Why twitter is such a great success...
Writing down thoughts and quotations has been practiced almost since the beginning of writing.
Proverbs of Ben Sira are finally very nice tweets.
I believe it’s Cicero who said: ‘Whatever is well said, no matter by whoever it’s said, I use it’.
Erasmus took notes because he argued that you don’t have time to read a book over again without loosing time to read new ones.
Blaise Pascal wrote his Pensées in tweets as well.
Rousseau pointed out he want to walk and took notes on new thoughts that arised from walking.
Dale Carnegie stimulates people to write down thoughts that can be used later on in his [Dale Carnegie’s Lifetime Plan for Success: The Great Bestselling Works Complete In One Volume]
Before blogs, microblogs, chronicles and even paper was available, people wrote already tweets on wall.
The popular Latin language is known due to this kind of inscriptions.
Isn’t Twitter just a modern form of textual graffiti ?
People want to leave their mark behind, knowing that “verba volant, scripta manent” (words fly away, but what’s written remains)
This is not really amazing because both hieroglyphs and runes were essentially used for religion, and if I’m not mistaken the predictions of the greek oracles where written down by priest.
Hebrew, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and Arabic are considered sacred language because the sacred or holy words were written down in these languages.
Initiation in reading was getting initiated in the possibility of reading these scriptures.
But writing has of even more importance, because it meant to be able to leave thoughts to posterity or send them to people far away.
Twitter has the same attraction to people as trees do the lovers: it enables people to leave a trace of the things they’ve felt, observed, discovered, lived or promised for ever and for everyone to see and read.