Social Media, Twitter, and ADHD

I have been posting daily tips and ideas on ADHD with twitter for the past two weeks now, http://twitter.com/drsvec/ and I’m starting to wonder if this type of media is contributing to the lack of focus in our society. With twitter you are only allowed to use 140 characters to get your message across. Initially, it was very difficult to compress my thoughts into that format. After posting a few however I find that I am thinking in “tweets” as opposed more detailed writing, and even this newsletter seems to be much too large already.

The point of twitter, I guess, is that people can follow thoughts in a very timely way that could be helpful. When there is a natural disaster those near the scenes have been noted to use twitter to help emergency services understand just what is going on. I think we used to use the telephone for this type of occurrence, or shortwave radio if the phones were down, but somehow twitter seems more acceptable. My son, who is in his early twenties, scoffs at twitter saying it is for my generation, which surprised me. I still don’t know how to use facebook, even though I have an account, or linked in or those other sites that I seem to have accounts on, but can’t even remember how to find the sites.

As my followers increase daily, I think the public is finding my posts useful and perhaps a way to get insight into my thoughts on ADHD without coming into the office. I am trying to post simple ideas and strategies to help with child and adult ADHD, so I will give it another few weeks to see how it is going. I also put up a post today on how my followers can get the “2 Hour 2 Second Parenting Guide” at my web site, so perhaps that can help some frustrated parents as well.

The point of all of this is to push myself into learning to use these new social media methods and technologies to improve my ability to help others. I am just not sure if the writing of brief “tweets” is training my brain to think in these short bursts or not. Only time will tell.

I may just be my own research subject, tweet for a few more months, and then do another brain scan to see if there are any changes. I have many of my own on file so it should be easy to compare. I don’t know of any research however that would support this theory. As far as reading twitter, can’t see a problem as the formula of reading short bursts of information have been around for some time now.

What are your thoughts on this topic?