You are wrong, put simply, for many reasons, but I will simply touch upon the most obvious.

‘ If I wanted a hack career I wouldn’t stand a chance, because I’ve been here for a year and a half already; you have to get going right from the word go.’

When I ran for OULC Campaigns Officer, my degree was further advanced than yours is now. Less than a term later, I had been elected Chair. How? Not, as you suggest, because I had decided before arriving to hack, but because I had a positive forward manifesto for the Club. That included such achievements as allowing transexuals to join Women’s Caucus and getting rid of much of the overbearing bureaucracy. It’s just an unprovoked attack upon people you’ve never met to claim that they are simply careerist hacks.

(It’s also worth remembering that while you were sneering at OULC, they were ensuring a Labour MP was elected in Oxford East)

Then let’s take student journalists. If people at the Oxford Student wanted to advance their own careers, then they wouldn’t investigate the Union officials and the OUSU hacks who misuse their power. And yet they do.

One of the greatest sins in public discourse is cynicism. While I have engaged opponents I have believed to be wrong, I can think of only one I have thought to be morally bankrupt. It’s just too pat to claim that hacks only seek personal preferement.

People’s (both in Balliol and in the Big Bad World) feelings *are* relative, and negative sentiments are usually punctuated by positive ones, rather than vice versa. The problem with Balliol is the everyone-has-to-be-friends-with-everyone mentality. As soon as you get past this, choose your real friends, devote all your friendship energy to them and forget about the others, life becomes much happier.

As you say, many ideas that might be worth sharing are, when expressed as conventional prose, far beyond the 140 character limit, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t, in principle, be compressed into, and expressed by, a tweet, if one leaves the boundaries of ordinary prose and casts off such ballast as auxiliaries, and grammar. If one really tries to express interesting and complex ideas with twitter, the message will quickly become quite abstract, or better: expressionist.

Twitter, approached in this manner, will not be quick, and thoughts will not be able to flow directly into writing, the tweeter becomes a poet, carefully crafting every word.

Abstract minimalist poetry, as I might call the result, can be a beautiful thing, but it is far from trivial, wherein lies the problem: a single tweet is far too easily dismissed. SMS could be said to be a better medium for this kind of thing: there, one can be sure that somebody will actually see it and try to “decrypt” the composition, but there is no guarantee they’ll understand it.

Still, I find the idea of the twitter poet intriguing. I don’t think I know of anybody that does this — maybe I will create a second account when I think of something to say that is too carefully and poetically crafted to be dumped in my usual spur-of-the-moment stream of notices.