A Day in Tweets

Life lived 140 characters at a time

We used to communicate only by talking to each other. Then we created symbols to stand for words, and we inscribed them on stone, then on clay, then on paper. But those mediums got too cumbersome and we invented machines to write virtual words. The first machines were huge cumbersome, but we figured out how to compress them so small they could fit in our pockets. Today we talk to each other over the air by pressing buttons with numbers and letters on them. Perhaps because the machines we use are so small, or maybe because we’ve grown impatient, we communicate using digital shorthand abbreviations to compress the meaning we want to convey into small chunks of sub-sentences. Since we carry our little machines in our pockets and we love to communicate, it is now possible to send hundreds of short messages every day about the most mundane of daily events. This short book uses real messages to tell the story of a day in tweets.