Twitter meets its cartoon match
Business Futurist | Foresight Strategist
If you’ve read this far, something probably connected.
Maybe it put words to something you’d been sensing but couldn’t quite land. Maybe it made something complicated feel clearer. Maybe it unsettled a position you thought you’d settled.
Good. That’s where this work lives.
Not forecasting. Not scenarios at 2050. Not more noise. What’s already moving. The shifts most organisations can’t yet see, name, or understand the full weight of. What it means. What to do about it while it’s still a possibility, not a problem. Short term and long.
Morris Misel has been doing this for 30 years across 160 industries, with boards, executive teams, and leadership groups in Australia and internationally. More than 2,800 engagements. Over a million people a year through conferences, boardrooms, and media.
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Choose Forward.
Twitter built its early following on brevity and text, but audiences have always responded more deeply to visual storytelling. When cartoon and animated formats found their way into social feeds, they triggered a different kind of engagement. It was an early signal that platforms built on words alone would need to adapt or cede attention to richer formats.
Organisations that treat social media as a broadcast channel for text announcements miss the point. Visual formats, cartoons, illustration, and short animation communicate tone, personality, and complexity faster than words. Understanding which format matches which message and platform is a strategic communication choice, not a design afterthought.
Attention is not passive. Audiences actively select formats that reward their time. Cartoons compress meaning, use humour to soften difficult ideas, and are more shareable than prose. When a cartoon consistently outperforms a written post, that is not a content fluke. It is a signal about how the audience wants to receive complex or uncomfortable information.
Digital communication has always moved toward the visual, from text to images to video. Twitter’s early character limit shaped a culture of wit and brevity. When visual content entered that space, it changed the dynamics. Every platform eventually has to answer to the audience’s preference for format, not the platform’s preference for simplicity.
The shift is not about choosing between text and visual. It is about understanding which combination creates understanding and action in a specific audience. Communicators who can work across both modes, and use visual formats to anchor complex ideas, will have a significant advantage as audiences sort their feeds by what holds attention.
