November 10, 2011
In the Church of Scotland’s drive to keep and attract members it has joined up to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the RSS feed system. Of these, the RSS feed system would seem to be the most sensible one for the Church to use to disseminate information about itself. But why would it use Twitter? If you’re reading this you probably know what Twitter is but in case you don’t, it’s a means to disseminate short messages, limited to 140 characters. Such messages are known as “tweets”. Naturally, the famous and not-so-famous and wannabe-famous and ithinki’minteresting-famous as well as millions, literally, of other people are signed up to Twitter. Twitter lends itself to facile messages, “Hey, I’m in Starbucks eating my socks and reading Jack Kerouac”, or “Sorry I missed that penalty it was an open goal but I was thinking of my new Ferrari” which some people post and which others want to read. Twitter also lends itself to abusive messages with no intellectual depth and the equally shallow responses. What Twitter does not lend itself to is any meaningful, in depth discussion which is what one might expect the Church of Scotland to want to encourage. This point of view has about 1,400 characters and has barely scratched the surface of the subject; what on earth is the point of a 140 character message?