This post was written by regular contributor Katie Wall.

Remember playing the game of telephone when you were younger? It always amazed me how a simple strand of words moving from one person to the next could get jumbled up so quickly, almost beyond recognition.

“There are four turtles and toys in the barnyard!” Umm…The original sentence was “There are more girls than boys at the party…”

The same thing happens with Twitter. When you only have 140 characters to convey your message a lot can get lost in translation. “You” becomes “u,” grammar is distorted and we #hashtagwhatevertheheckwewant to avoid spaces. Sometimes messages are changed so much that they become mere fractions of what they used to be (I know I’m guilty of this, it’s amazing how much we can all slice and dice a sentence so that it fits within the character limit)!

Beyond forwarding simple changes in syntax, Twitter moves at a pace that allows false news to spread alarmingly fast. Who could forget when Johnny Depp or Zach Braff died? Or the more recent rumor that American Airlines would be flying doctors and nurses to Haiti for free, which created a wave of people sharing what seemed to be time sensitive information rapidly.

Do you think we are cheapening our own messaging by limiting ourselves to 140 characters? Do you think that we’re losing important pieces of information in the shortening of messages? Is it too easy to share false information now? And are the quickly spreading rumors getting in the way of us sharing greater truths?

Photo copyright of doobybrain.com.

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