Gresham/Morgan Internet Law - Cheap Tweeting Drives Out Dear Blogging

In the 1500s Sir Thomas Gresham observed that Cheap money drives out dear.  This originally applied to two types of money, e.g. gold coins and cheaper metal coins. The reasoning is that people with two types of money will hand over the bad or cheap ones, and hold onto the dear ones. The law was actually named after him by another British economist in 1858, and has been applied to many areas where the true value is different than what people need to accept.

Twitter has triggered a similar tendency on the internet.  Cheap comments (140 character tweets) are driving out dear comments (multiple paragraph blog posts).  I'm a very guilty party. In the last few months I've done dozens of tweets and fewer than a post a month to this blog.

The danger is that people with serious thoughts about a subject, which would call for a several paragraph thoughtful post, properly cross linked to interesting web content, will now just tweet the essence.  And the dialogues that great blog posts engender will be lost.

I'm not sure there's anyway to stop this (after all, it is the law), but I'm going to try and add more blogging to my twittering.

Comments

[Philip Low]

Agreed

[Paul Bradshaw]

I'm not sure it's as simple as that. Twitter removes the pressure to write more than 140 characters when you would spend more time blogging 'here's something interesting'; that leaves you more time to do the quality stuff. It raises the bar for blogging, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

[Johnny Abacus]

One of the interesting things about Gresham's Law is that it only functions in the presence of legal tender laws - in their absence, 'good' money handily out competes 'bad' money. I see no obvious analogue in the social-media world.

"The danger is that people with serious thoughts about a subject, which would call for a several paragraph thoughtful post, properly cross linked to interesting web content, will now just tweet the essence."

From what I can tell, this is called good writing. With URL shorteners and creativity, evidence can even be thrown in the mix.

"And the dialogues that great blog posts engender will be lost."

This, to me, is the real deal. I rarely see people link to tweets. Instead, most people re-tweet as a method of propagation. This lack of linking combined with the transitory nature of the medium means that twitter makes having non-real-time conversations extremely difficult.

Quite frankly, though, I just don't see the problem. Far more often, blog posts die in draft format. At least now, some of them live as tweets, which take much less mental energy to do well.

[concerned]

If this is true, then we should be witnessing the decline of civilization "way to early".

Twitter = Lazy Blogger

[Bob Finlayson]

Our society has been on a quest for some time now to find the lowest common denominator of intellectual capital. Perhaps the tweet is it. Coin of the Realm in the land of the intellectually vapid? But I think the news biz (or what’s left of it) provides a better guide. Tweets are headlines; blogs are stories. You can stay mildly informed by reading the headlines (tweets), but it you want intellectual stimulation and fuel for more than casual discussion, you need to read the stories (blogs).

[twitter.com/SenderOK]

I've long tried to say on Twitter that a big way to monetization for Twitter would be to charge $9.95 per month to extend tweets into much longer blog postings hosted by Twitter itself as the Page 2 of a Twitter account. The original tweet would still be 140 characters long minus a "continued" link.

Everyone would still get the free front page where we barely have enough space to get half a thought out before being cut off. For a small fee, those of us who have something to say can have our own blogs on Page 2 the postings of which our tweets can link into when we want.

I would have assumed @Ev and @Biz would have thought of this and implemented by now...but I was the slow moving turkey myself for having thought of the concept of Twitter on a cold day in St. Petersburg, Russia in October 2004 and dismissed it.

I dismissed the idea of Twitter because I felt the Russian telecoms would have cell phone to bulletin board functionality by Christmas 2004 (they already had websites where you could text to someone's cell phone from a website if your own phone battery died) and I was sure that Sprint and AT&T would follow soon after with American versions of bulletin board sites.

I had no idea that $Billions could be made by simply establishing a common portal to implement something these giant phone companies could be expected to do and then reach a critical mass of users.

Anyway, right now I find myself blogging via Twitter sometimes by typing in successive 140 character sentences to form a 5 tweet "paragraph".

[Nintendo Ds cases]

I subscribed to your blog when is the next post

[payday loans]

The author of waytooearly.firstround.com has written an excellent article. You have made your point and there is not much to argue about. It is like the following universal truth that you can not argue with: Everything takes longer than it takes. Thanks for the info.

[jarMadakasy]

Hallo,

Ik ga trouwen en ben op zoek naar een trouwjurk.

uik kwam op deze trouwkleding blog...

wat vinden jullie hier van?

Dank je!

Annemarie