We use Twitter daily to stay up-to-date with current information, our favorite celebrities and other useless trending topics.
Despite being instant, allowing us to think faster and giving us information in real time, Twitter is making us dumber through the abuse of the hashtag, clouding of judgment and return of text abbreviations.
Using hashtags in conversation and places other than Twitter is a rampant problem.
Hashtags do their job of specifying exactly what you’re tweeting about for things in the big picture, but using them on places such as Facebook or offline doesn’t work. In addition, wearing “#swag” T-shirts is awful. You look stupid. For the sake of everyone’s sanity, stop. Please.
At the end of many movie trailers and commercials, advertisers place hashtags so people can get excited and talking about a product. Unfortunately, these are ignored, and the use is wasted by things like “#1DAlphabet.”
This wastes the entire purpose of what Twitter could be — a place to keep up-to-date with the news and get small but more interesting bits of advertisements.
To expand on how Twitter is making us dumber, I only need to say one thing: Chris Brown.
Chris Brown has sparked more controversy from his account in the last year than almost anything or anyone else in the entertainment industry.
It’s a prime example of how people aren’t thinking when they tweet.
He’s done everything from dressing up as a terrorist on Halloween to deleting his account after getting into an argument.
But Brown isn’t the only famous person who has dealt with controversy from not thinking.
Ashley Cole, a renowned soccer player for Chelsea Football Club and the English Men’s National Team, has also caused a stir. In less than a week, Cole tweeted both against a ruling the British Football Association (FA) made on a case and against a critic who insisted that Cole should not play in a national game.
Because of the two rants, the FA established a code of conduct for its players, thus making Cole another example of someone not censoring himself on Twitter.
And to make it worse, we’re reverting back to typing without using actual words because of Twitter’s character limitations.
Even before Twitter, people were using spellings like “b4,” “h8” and “thnks fr th mmrs.” Using that now just looks awful.
It’s the result of the 140-character limitations that transforms what could be instant, to-the-point updates and turns it into short, nonsensical bursts of stupid thoughts.
Rob Kitchen is a 19-year-old mass communication freshman from Metairie.
