Down the Rabbit Hole

Twitter’s  decision to double its character count from 140 to 280 characters last year hasn’t dramatically changed the length of Twitter posts. According to new data released by the company this morning, Twitter is still a place for briefer thoughts, with only 1% of tweets hitting the 280-character limit, and only 12% of tweets longer than 140 characters.

Brevity, it seems, is baked into Twitter – even when given expanded space, people aren’t using it.

Only 5% of tweets are longer than 190 characters, indicating that Twitter users have been for so long trained to keep their tweets short, they haven’t adapted to take advantage of the extra room to write.

“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”

— Albert Einstein

Enter the labyrinth and embrace serendipity.

Montaigne kept what he called a “common place book” — a book of quotes, sentences, metaphors and  miscellany that he could use at a moment’s notice.

Through the years, a man peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses, and people. Shortly before its death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.

— Jorge Luis Borges

The whole idea of a labyrinth of hidden knowledge, of messages in a bottle, and so on and connected with the research this is maybe an idea that could help us attract students to this concept it’s so fundamental to academia.
The question becomes how do we get students excited about research? Not in the stodgy old way that the term tends to imply.

A knock-on effect of this additional question is what is research’s relevance for today’s students whom are overwhelmed with the relentless torrent of information for which they primary challenge is to filter stuff out rather than dig like an archaeologist.

The labyrinth is now the torrent of information that the valuable stuff is immersed within thanks to digital and mobile to a large extent.