Twitter conversations have obvious, often frustrating, limitations. But the platform also allows discussions to progress in ways they never could in real life.
At every point in a conversation there are countless turns it could take. Often there are multiple aspects of a remark that could be refined, quibbled with, explored. And any utterance has the potential to launch a thousand tangents.
In the offline world decisions are constantly made that preclude most of a conversation’s possibilities. These decisions are often made by the loud, dominant, impetuous, and self-assured. They wrest any control from those who tend to think before they speak or who are simply unable to make themselves heard. Often by the time a less aggressive person sees an opening to merge onto the discussion highway, the opportunity to make their point has long passed. The conversation has moved on.
On Twitter, though, thoughts are delivered in discrete pieces, each of which can branch off and take another path. It’s like time traveling to explore parallel universes.
Of course we are still limited by our own brains, which cannot keep track of too many threads at once. Also, Twitter itself is not ideally set up for keeping track of where conversations split off. Sometimes it requires some extra clicking to figure out what exactly your interlocutor is responding to.
Still, I see great potential in this new, non-linear way of talking.
