Twitter makes humans look like bots

Martin Weigert at MeshedSociety:

To some extend, Twitter, with its 140 character limit and its encouragement of instantness and impulsive comments, has turned its users into bot-like creatures, who keep tweeting the same lines, the same reactions, the same ideas, the same arguments. If you are a Twitter user and don’t believe this, just type “[often used word(s)] from:yourusername” into Twitter search. Looking at my own results was pretty uncomfortable.

Sure, there is more humor and irony on Twitter than what you can expect from the encounter with a customer service bot. But only among a subset of users. And only as long as the discussion doesn’t touch sensitive topics such as [enter random object of outrage]. If that happens, everyone sticks to their pre-fabricated text blocks and appears to follow a very narrow conversation protocol.