I was googling (yes it’s a word now) this topic and found very few items. I know it’s real so I decided to write something about it.
Twitter’s influence on communication, specifically writing, is already huge and it will only continue to change the way we communicate. In fairness the influence should not be limited to twitter. Anywhere we communicate in short, choppy bits, changes the way we communicate. The whole social media paradigm is based on terse, quick-to-publish bits of information. As a result we write in “leetspeak“, write with shorter words, use contractions, use micro-URL services (e.g. bit.ly), and use “hash tags”.
In addition to writing on twitter.com or the myriad of third-party plug-ins, we craft blogs or other online writing to fit the 140-character space of twitter. News headlines have always been terse – even cryptic – but now the lead paragraph is getting twitterized. And don’t get me started on twitterspeak: all the cute phrases like “tweeple” that resulted from this cultural phenomenon.