Of Tweets, Trumpets & Triumphs

The last time I checked, the Twitter Meter showed 650 million tweets had been sent out worldwide within the last 24 hours – some 7000 tweets per second.

Now if I was writing the above sentence on Twitter, I would have reached exactly the max of 140 characters allowed – with spaces and punctuations in count.

The beauty of this remarkable and engaging communication tool is that it thrives on the discipline of brevity. As Twitter celebrated its eleventh anniversary a couple of weeks ago, it is no exaggeration that the Triumph of Trump was also orchestrated through a Symphony of Tweets that he indulged and still indulges in. It’s a powerhouse of a communication medium.  Whether one loved Trump or loved to hate him, he captivated all the senses, overpowered lengthy explanations, commanded undivided attention, stirred up emotions and capsised the smooth-sailing boat of politics in the US. The style is the message and the messenger is the style. Like it or not.

In other parts of the world as well, it was the brevity of the instant message that was used as a Trumpet. It rallied masses to bring about fireworks in the Arab Spring Revolutions in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt in the face of suppression by state-controlled traditional media.

Those of us who indulge in the inky and pleasurable exploit of writing columns are hard pressed, as indeed I am, to keep content within 1000 words; and it’s traumatic to limit it to 500 words or less!

Indeed, the growth and breadth of the exponential expansion of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram and other social media is underpinned and propelled by the instant brevity of messaging. Twitter, alone, dishes out close to 250 billion tweets per year.

The trend is affecting the corporate world as well. There is an increasing demand by boards for brevity and focus; executive summaries; and concise clarity on what options are offered and what decisions are needed. Get to the point, is the clarion call.

Years ago, I interacted with a former chairman of a leading investment bank and sent him the minutes of a meeting I had with him and others. I wrote it up in painstaking detail. The minutes came back to me with a scrawl “you and I seem to have attended different meetings!” It took me a while to recover from the shock. I sent back a one-pager, translated to simple English, with key discussion points and decisions made. The same banker used to say very little and listen carefully while peering over his eyeglasses perched on his nose. In a relaxed moment, I asked him why he said so little. His response: “I never learnt much listening to my own voice.”

In similar vein it was Pascal, the 17th century French philosopher, who wrote apologetically at the end of an elegant letter: “I have only made this longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.”

If Trump fired up Twitter, there are others who have a sustained following on the Twitter platform. Occupying the top-most spot is the pop superstar, the politically active, Katy Perry with 96 million; and Barack Obama at 86 million — with as many as 650,000 actively following him, even at this writing, on a daily basis. The current ‘Grand Master of Twitter’ Donald Trump has close to 30 million followers but more is written and disseminated in the global media about his tweets than of anyone else’s on earth.

His tweets and statements are grabbed from the burning Twitter platform at every turn. They are then turned into fodder for late night talk show hosts. Jay Leno in one of his comedy routines referred to a pre-election interview that Trump gave to the Christian Broadcasting Network where Trump said: “I believe in God.”

And Leno quips “but of course, The Donald was talking about himself.”

(The writer can be contacted at [email protected]