While using Twitter this weekend I witnessed a couple of debates between various Twitter users that I follow. Leaving people and personalities aside, I don’t think that Twitter is a very good platform for debates.
- The 140 character limit really causes problems. You’ve either got to make your point in 26 words or less or else continue a conversation over multiple Tweets which tend to get lost if you have a number of people in your timeline.
- In some cases, I believe that people’s responses were compressed to making a “sound bite” that would fit into the 140 chr. limit.
- The ability to adequately explain a point of view was just not there, particular if anyone watching the debate didn’t understand or appreciate the full context of the conversation.
- Regardless of intent, a number of comments were perceived to be ad hominem arguments, at least in part due to brevity (again, my opinion) and word choice
The thing is, Twitter provides a forum that a lot of people can participate in and thus, if nothing else, it has a share of attention that could be used to have debates of this type.
Maybe it would be worth creating a Twitter debate guidelines document of some kind.
Does one already exist? I’m going to check this out.
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