If we think of Twitter as a Borg or hive mind, it would have to be described as self-lobotomizing. The 140-character limit and imperfect threading make it difficult to express complex thoughts or have rational discussions. Yet this diseased organism is increasingly harvested for sound bites by journalists.
Writers who express their thoughts well in long form sound like dolts in clipped twitter-speech. Critic Katha Pollitt, discussing who deserved to be on the 10 dollar bill, writes "Hamilton by far the better man," which sounds vaguely Cro-Magnon. (I forget what the rest of the 140 characters said, possibly "me no like Jackson.")
My point, difficult to shoehorn into a single tweet, is that what happens in the hive mind mainly makes sense in the context of the hive mind. To pluck out a single "neuron" often requires grabbing four or five surrounding neurons, and quoting this mess as a series of screenshots is an inelegant and ugly form of writing. Yet so many writers are being forced to do this to stay relevant.
