Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Monday, November 23, 2009

No, I Won't Be Getting On Twitter

To the nice person who enjoys my futurological brickbats and occasional acerbic one-liners so much she wishes I would start tweeting, and stop with the sprawling "tl;dr" e-pistles, I must say thanks, very, but, you know, no thanks. I am in fact temperamentally incapable of tweeting in a sustained way -- if it makes any kind of sense to connect sustenance with tweeting in the first place. I am no more inclined to follow anybody on Twitter than I am stealthfully to stalk a brittle-boned dead-eyed scarcely post-pubescent celebrity into a public restroom in the hope of finding in their recently relinquished bowl a floating fragment of unflushed poo. I eagerly aver that Twitter is useful as a form of reportage in contexts where the contours and stakes of a process (like a mass protest or a legislative process) are changing very rapidly and unpredictably on the basis of scattered diverse stakeholder inputs. But Twitter is in my view an anti-thought anti-analysis anti-judgement medium more generally and actually destructive of these wherever it draws too much attention to itself. One cannot analyze, contextualize, or argue in a Tweet, but only testify to ill-digested sensations, observations, and prejudices. Twitter is where wit withers, it is a further brutalization of common sense and common cause and common wealth at the worst possible time in our collective and planetary life.

6 comments:

jimf said...

> I am no more inclined to follow anybody on Twitter
> than I am stealthfully to stalk a brittle-boned
> dead-eyed scarcely post-pubescent celebrity into
> a public restroom in the hope of finding in their
> recently relinquished bowl a floating fragment of
> unflushed poo.

You mean you're not sniffing Ashton Kutcher's latest
brain farts?

http://www.newsweek.com/id/215542

M. David Green said...

No tweet stands alone and without context. There's great depth and nuance in the stream. But only if you participate.

Dale Carrico said...

Yeah, keep telling yourself that.

Anne Corwin said...

I haven't been able to compel myself onto the Twitterwagon either. Recently I considered trying to use it to regale the world with updates about what my kittens are doing, but my brain does not work in "sound bite" mode, apparently, even when it comes to things I'm liable to go on and on about. And re. your Brickbats, as concise and pithy as they are I suspect they'd each still exceed Twitter's teensy character limit.

Athena Andreadis said...

Facebook is even worse, if that's possible: Web Flatunauts and Electronic Tribbles

Anonymous said...

What is this twitter you speak off?

The excrement of the early teens. I never even looked at this.