My feelings of tweegret have overcome me, despite my long, strong efforts to resist it.
So I have become a twit – which is by far the best noun coined for those who tweet, using twitter.
But rather than give in to a phenomenon that seems so banal and narcissistic as to render even facebookland a veritable utopia of social altruism, I have decided to “double down.”
Here is my twitter manifesto, #sayitin14 – dedicated to minimalizing further the already minimalist tendencies in twitter:
I will only post tweets 14 characters in length or fewer. Note that this does not include links or hashtags.
Originally, I thought to make my rule a limit of posts to one word. But I decided that to better double down on the original 140 character limit, a 14 character limit was more elegant.
I would like to observe that in a unicoded, character-per-syllable language with essentially optional spacing between words, like Korean, 14 characters is still quite sufficient to post entire sentences.
English, with its relatively low information density (on a per character basis), is more limited, and the restriction will lead to a certain absurdism. I hope.
My username is @waejeorae (which is based on my joke “Korean Name” 왜저래 [waejeorae = what the…? , what’s up?] – because the pronunciation resembles that of my true name in Korean order: Way Jared). If you follow me, I promise to be disappointing.
As this late adoption of the now ubiquitous twitter platform shows, I am not really an “early adopter.” I certainly have been an early adopter in some realms: I wrote all my papers in high school on computer (1979~1983), I programmed my first spreadsheet app in 1986, I bought my first laptop PC in 1992, I published my first website (that people – namely, my students – actually visited) in 1995 (on geocities – remember that?), and this here blog thingy was started well ahead of the technology adoption curve in 2004. But I’ve been quite late in other areas: I only bought my first cell phone in 2004, and only got my first smartphone last year. And here I am joining twitter only past their IPO (which is a well-established signal of outright decline in the technology world). So whether I adopt some technology or not is largely connected with my perception of its usefulness, rather than some desire or interest in adopting new technologies for the sheer sake of being at the vanguard.