John Piper Response to John Mayer on Tweeting

John Piper writes:

I began tweeting in 2009, and explained why in a blog post. Now, two years into it, do I think it's a good idea?

Let me answer that by responding to a confession by musician, singer-songwriter, John Mayer. A few weeks ago at Berklee College of Music he confessed his debilitating addiction to Twitter.

The tweets are getting shorter, but the songs are still 4 minutes long. You're coming up with 140-character zingers, and the song is still 4 minutes long. . . I realized about a year ago that I couldn't have a complete thought anymore. And I was a tweetaholic. I had four million twitter followers, and I was always writing on it. And I stopped using twitter as an outlet and I started using twitter as the instrument to riff on, and it started to make my mind smaller and smaller and smaller. And I couldn't write a song.

My experience of publishing three Tweets a day (usually written and scheduled a week or two ahead of time) is different. Mayer said, "I couldn't have a complete thought anymore." To me this is almost the opposite of what happens. But that may depend on what we aim to do with Twitter.

Read the whole thing here.