I’ve noticed that instead of sharing a concise and searchable 140 character message, people have taken to sharing an image of a person with a longer quote on it. Is this how social media works now?
Its a trend that’s taken off because both Twitter and Facebook have made the process of embedding and displaying images in their respective timelines much easier.
For example:
https://twitter.com/UtopianFireman/status/551821772639981569
Awesome #quote by Aziz Ansari! I'm happy to be a feminist in the true equality sense. #leadership pic.twitter.com/LpOhRdWfAJ
— 🟣 Bobby Umar | Keynote Speaker (@raehanbobby) January 5, 2015
https://twitter.com/NatalieSturowsk/status/552189070815031296
https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/552342880078299136
I just love Owen Jones! #toryscum @OwenJones84 pic.twitter.com/fYxlBHbveL
— Simon King (@KingQPR) January 6, 2015
I planned to post this observation a couple of weeks ago, but then the Charlie Hebdo massacre happened and I didn’t want to appear frivolous. But at least a few more examples manifested themselves.
Steve Bell, Cartoonist for the @guardian on @bbcnews. Perfect. #CharlieHebdo pic.twitter.com/eXEsuHvZkh
— Jamie Robertson (@Jamie_Robertson) January 7, 2015
There is no peace unless Muslims can reform, writes @PCollinsTimes http://t.co/fLL2XqD0zF pic.twitter.com/zKQDkYBMiD
— The Times and The Sunday Times (@thetimes) January 9, 2015
Scott Berkun called out the point… ironically in a text image of his own.
The trend on twitter of taking images of paragraphs of text to send them around is backwards – here's why #twitter pic.twitter.com/bcuTpsAT2t
— Scott Berkun (@berkun) January 8, 2015
But ho ho ho, I’d already got there first.
Important point: pic.twitter.com/ekCLtKaJ1M
— Robert Sharp रॉबर्ट शार्प (@robertsharp59) January 6, 2015
Which of course got loads of re-tweets, because the Internet does like a bit of meta.