Toward the end of last year Mat Honan, on BuzzFeed reported on the screenshort. Honan explained that a screnshort is essentially:
a chunk of text, screen-shotted, and embedded in a tweet. It’s become an extremely popular way to share a passage from a story.Perhaps this was originally a workaround for getting more text into a tweet, and as such an appreciation of text, an expression of deep respect toward it. As Honan explained, a screenshot of text made linking to it unnecessary. It brought the entire text straight to us, no additional clicking necessary. But from the humble beginnings of a desire to cram more text into a short message things seem to have taken a different turn. In April of this year Owen Williams, in The Next Web asked whether the screenshort was killing the blog. People, especially celebrities, were posting texts too long for Twitter but short enough for a quick read as screenshots. Williams claims that this has become a popular means of expression:
It seems that the consensus is that if you want to share your thoughts, you write it in a notes app and take a screenshot.I admit that I find this more than a bit strange, though apparently this is seen as being more "personal", particularly for celebrities who usually have paid staff uploading messages to various social media sites. Screenshotting a note has more of an aura of actually being written by the celebrity him/herself. Then again, in the examples I've seen the screenshorts are of typed text, not handwritten, and if the objective is to be more personal it seems to me that it would make sense to photograph a handwritten note and post that.
What all this may mean is that they're effectively making it impossible for themselves / others to find their tweets as well as any hashtag(s) by idiotically using images instead of text. They may think they're being all clever in getting around twitter's character limit but reality would seem to indicate quite the opposite.I suppose that the day when Google will be able to index screenshotted text isn't too far off, but as someone who thinks that one of the greatest benefits of text is its searchability, I find this trend (if it really is one) highly problematic.
Not only that but text to speech readers for the blind will fail. Yay for reduced accessibility! Not.