It has become second nature today to fire off a short social media missive in response to every little thing we like or dislike. Social platforms have both encouraged us to lean towards loquaciousness and to express ourselves in condensed short soundbites, the wittier and more sarcastic the better. What might happen if social media forced us towards the opposite direction, enforcing a minimum length on posts rather than a maximum and requiring us to tone down inflammatory emotional rhetoric in favor of clinical discourse?
The short-message rapid-fire nature of social media has programmed an entire generation to pour forth their perspectives on every topic and event imaginable, regardless of whether they themselves have even the most remote experience or expertise with which to actually comment on said issue.
Much as politicians learn to speak in brief meme-worthy soundbites, so too has the short-message format of social media encouraged us to post short viral-worthy snippets of our thoughts.
This incentive structure encourages us to post about things we have little to say about, in hopes of attracting viral fame or simply seeing our thoughts in digital print. More to the point, it encourages us to post before we’ve actually had the time to properly research and consider an issue.
In many ways, social media represents the elementary schoolyard shouting match where volume and willingness to talk over everyone else wins over reason and well-researched thoughts.
What if social media forced us to be more akin to a college debate team, leveraging not merely volume, emotional appeals and empty rhetoric, but actually forcing us to bring research and reason to our commentary?
Imagine if social platforms required a minimum of 500 words before a post could be submitted. To ensure users would not simply type gibberish to reach their minimum word count, linguistic analysis algorithms could ensure coherent prose. Narrative structure analysis could be layered on top to require that posts follow an argumentative essay structure or first-person narrative.
Suddenly the act of sharing on social media becomes not about who is the quickest draw with the wittiest comeback, but rather who has the most coherent argument or narrative to offer.
Additional filters could be applied to eliminate emotional and inflammatory language, with the author’s arguments untouched. This would promote rational discourse over the censorship of ideas.
An author expressing their displeasure with their government’s policy decisions would be forced to describe their concerns in a lengthy post with clinical language, rather than a profanity-laden diatribe of 140 characters.
Imposing additional costs on authorship would force social media users to weigh whether they have enough to say about a given issue to warrant the necessary investment of their time.
In many ways, requiring long-form journalistic writing on social media would move us away from the conversational speech that is so easily sidetracked by emotions and schoolyard arguments towards the carefully researched and clinical discourse more common in academic scholarship.
Requiring users to write long posts would not rid the online world of hate. Instead, it would focus on the inadvertent toxicity that comes from the peer pressure of responding quickly to every imaginable topic with the inevitable disagreements of a diverse world and desire to end a disliked conversation quickly with a dominating dismissal.
Rather than respond to a differing perspective with profanity or a personal insult, long-form social media would require us to actually describe our disagreement in detail, profoundly altering the conversational nature that defines today’s social media interactions.
In essence, long-form social media would transform our platforms from transcribed telephone conversations to our previous era of scholarly letters.
Most importantly, the transition from many short missives to a smaller number of longer and more thoughtful pieces would give us more time to reflect on what we read, absorbing it rather than merely forwarding it.
Putting this all together, it is intriguing to consider what social media might look like if it forced us to think rather than merely speak.
