You have 140 characters—no more.

You may have noticed that Twitter is similar to profanity: quick emotional reactions coming impulsively and lacking dimension. Whoa, would you like to see the waffle I ate for breakfast? Hey now, who wants to see my dog Dewi begging for a Milk Bone? I guess you would like to see my latest DIY birdhouse that I made using Legos and chopsticks. Maybe you would like to know how many steps I recorded on my Fitbit. I can go off like a popcorn machine with these puffy kernels of triviality. No need to analyze, to think deeply, or to develop an idea. React—take a reflex hammer just below the patella and invoke a knee-jerk reaction. There you go.

This is the age of road rage, of internet highway impatience (darn four-second wait times), and of, as the Nike’s motto suggests, the era when we should “Just Do It.” The Millennium and Gen-X multitudes know their right-click from their left click. Their necks stoop over smart phones four-five hours a day, which will likely result in a bunch of hunchbacks 40 years from now. “With smartphone users now spending an average of two to four hours a day with their heads dropped down, this results in 700 to 1,400 hours a year of excess stresses seen about the cervical spine”, according to the research. (Khaleeli)

Neck-benders, you have 140 characters to say it all—no more.

Allow me. Here goes.

But wait. Before I do that, help me understand why the dot commandeered the period, why the number symbol became the hashtag? Is there no end to the perversion of standard symbols? The guillemets and brackets have morphed into tools for making little faces at the end of text messages and emails. Emoticons litter correspondence, most of which add nothing but puzzlement to me.

Enough. Here, then, is my Twitter message, which I reserve for this space because I do not have an account and never will.

Have a nice day. It is what it is. Don’t take any wooden nickels. At the end of the day--:D<3. And this: (:-(. Not to mention this: >;->.

Counting spaces, I got everything down in fewer than 140 characters. Of course, I did not need that many spaces because, bereft of concentrated thought, I find myself like a sparrow on the wire tweeting to the ether, hoping that some other bird will tweet back and let me know that I am not alone.

My conclusion: social media are #.dumb.

A number sign followed by a period followed by the word dumb.

Khaleeli. The Guardian. 24 November 2014. 6 June 2015.