not with a bang, but with a twitter?
Twitter is the new hot social network in the news. That means it's next in line to be blamed for the downfall of humanity.
According to an ever-growing number of editorials, blog posts and political cartoons, Twitter is the most evil thing to be unleashed on the web. It's decried as an indulgence of overly plugged in, narcissistic technophiles and used as a punch line by those who believe our ability to absorb vast amounts of information is being threatened by what seems like an outbreak of web induced ADD. However, when we look outside of the depressing memes in the media, it seems that the critics are missing the forest for one particular tree.
There seems to be something about methods of mass communication that encourages some people to say things they really shouldn't and their statements can, and will come back to hurt them. On Twitter, it's cost jobs, ended working relationships between corporations and got an impulsive juror into potential legal trouble. Not even tech savvy billionaires and congressmen on hush hush government trips seem to be immune to a lapse in their filter mechanisms. And on the other side of the spectrum, there are twitterers trying to be their own paparazzi. Follow them and get ready to be bored out of your mind. Of course this tells us far more about the people instead of the technology they're using. When good tweets go bad, the technology is an enabler rather than a catalyst, but if you're trying to use the popularity of Twitter to get traffic to your stories, you have to make the technology part of the narrative.
That brings us to the claim that exchanging messages of 140 characters or less is a symptom of a collective reduction in our brainpower and attention spans. It's a popular meme but when we consider the fact that movies are getting longer, books are getting thicker and a number of popular magazines like Harper's and The Atlantic are publishing cover stories that can exceed some 10,000 words (for comparison, most posts on this blog are between 600 and 750 words or so), we're actually ready and willing to absorb ever more information. Add to that the sheer amount of news and analytical reviews we read online on a wide variety of credible and popular blogs as well as countless news sites ran by well known media outlets, and we have a populace drowning in information rather than reducing the world to a few tweets. If used right, Twitter is a promotional vehicle and a place to exchange ideas or breaking news rather than just tell the world how much you like the latte you just ordered at the local Starbucks.
Rather than willfully deteriorating our access to news, we're actually trying to get more. When a cartoonist portrays Twitter or blogs as a replacement for the news or an editorial columnist for a newspaper or a major news channel tries to attack the credibility of blogs, they're missing the point. We're no longer just casual news readers but highly connected news junkies who want to know what's happening in our sphere of interests. While a newspaper is closing down, a media outlet is reaching out to embrace the tools that the papers decided to see as competition. After the dust settles, newspapers as we know them may be no more, but investigative cover stories and articles by notable journalists and comprehensive local news are still going to be there. It's just that instead of being in newsprint, they'll spread electronically or be published in a variety of magazines. And instead of trying to replace them, blogs and tweets will spread these stories across the world to give great authors and analysts more exposure.
