1) The fan phenomenon. The person with the most followers is Barack Obama, a very pop president, followed by the queens and kings of pop with the most Grammys, MTV and Superbowl breaks. In Spain soccer players thrash.
2) The cut, that witty phrase or edge with which adolescents release sociability, the word that they seek to leave speechless, be it with crude sincerity or with a manipulative lie. Now it’s called zasca. It fits Twitter because it fits into the initial 140 characters, doubled in 2018. Shorter, sharper.
Twitter works very well as a telegram, for short-sentence ads like that telegraph service that was paid by the word; it was delivered in hand and put the heart in the throat because, like the cat of Schrödinger, until it was opened you could not know if it announced a life or a death, a congratulation or a condolence.
In the hands of Donald Trump, Twitter was a spreader of massive lies tailor-made until he was expelled from doing his Arab Spring in Washington. It is the great example of trolls and trolls, of lies and ridicule.
Does brevity favor you? In Rome they had the epigram that, “to the similar bee”, it had to be “sharp, sweet and sharp”. The Martial hand made them famous. Some are very “QMD!” (“When your slave hurts his minga, you, Névolo, your ass hurts. I’m not a fortune-teller, but I know what you’re doing”). The maxim is the gender of the moralist. Camus, who prefaced Chamfort’s, saw in it a mathematical equation. “Enjoy and do enjoy, without harming yourself or others; this is what it comes down to, I think, all morality ”is a maxim from Chamfort’s less-Chubby repertoire. The problem with Twitter is not brevity –which can come from a long distillation–, but the instantaneousness produced by this explosion that sets the network on fire. That impulsiveness is very adolescent and very emotional and very contemporary.
– .
