Twitter Nation Has Arrived: How Scared Should We Be?

By Alexander Zaitchik, AlterNet. Posted February 21, 2009.

What's more, say Twitter's defenders, haters like me focus on the banality and chirpiness of tweets because we are ignorant of the wonderful personal and social benefits of regular Twitter use. The company's founders go so far as to call it the ultimate civilizational feel-good experience. "It is about the triumph of the human spirit," Twitter CEO Biz Stone recently told New York magazine.

Chief among the Twampions of the Human Spirit is the tech journalist and blogger Clive Thompson, who has been on self-appointed Twitter guard duty since 2007. In the first conceptual defense of microblogging ever penned, Thompson concedes in Wired that tweets are often grating and vapid. But, he argues, over the course of hundreds and thousands of individually insufferable tweets, eventually an "ambient awareness" is achieved that creates greater empathy toward, and understanding between, groups of people. Within the patterns of minutia about office life and television habits, argues Thompson, dwells an online cosmic consciousness.

Twitter and other constant-contact media give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.Twitter is almost the inverse of narcissism. It's practically collectivist—you're creating a shared understanding larger than yourself.

And what do these "weird, fascinating feats" of Twitter-enabled coordination look like? In awe of the power of the "practically collectivist" Twitter, Thompson relays the story of the time he met a friend for lunch. Even before sitting down, he already knew from reading her Twitter feed that this friend "was nervous about last week's big presentation, got stuck in a rare spring snowstorm, and [was] addicted to salt bagels."

But salt bagels are just the beginning for the mighty Twitter Overmind, ever a work in progress. Just last week, Thompson contributed to Twitter's national epic psychosocial genome project by tweeting: "I'm extremely sad that I can't find Liz Phair's 'Rocket Boy' to blip on blip.fm." Frowny faces all around, Clive.

Thompson builds upon his edifice of bullshit in a September 2008 cover story for the New York Times magazine. With the need to fill up several magazine pages, Thompson gushes that Twitter not only melds a group of individuals into a near "telepathic" unit of kinship, it is the ultimate Socratic app.

The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you're feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It's like the Greek dictum to 'know thyself,' or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness. Having an audience can make the self-reflection even more acute.

Again, Thompson instructs us to put up with thousands of idiotic and maddening tweets in order to "get" the full beauty and bounty of the site. Only after we burn swaths of our lives reading mindless tweets will the Twitter oracle reveal the wisdom it reserves for dedicated supplicants. Thompson doesn't explain why having an audience makes self-reflection "even more acute," whatever that means. Nor does he betray any concern that 140 characters might be enough space to state a tiny fact about a Liz Phair song, but not enough to reflect or meditate on it by any meaningful definition of the words.

But taking people like Thompson seriously isn't necessary when the proof is right there on Twitter.com. What does the praxis of "acute self-reflection" look like in the Twitter Age?

It looks like this: "someone has coffee and it smells gooood. must resist." (Twitter name: dorisnight), and "hey, i still have the # for twitter on my cell phone. whatever. im bored" (Twitter name: DomGatto). "Bladder has been treated. Best part of that appointment? I've lost 12 pounds total since I started dieting." (Twitter name: Blueinsideout)

The most maddening defense of Twitter is that it constitutes some form of art. Boosters like to claim that compressing communication into 140 characters results in a kind of computer-age poetry. "[Twitter users are] trying to describe their activities in a way that is interesting to others: the status update as a literary form," writes Thompson in his NYT piece. Howard Lindzon, founder of StockTwits, recently told the Financial Times that the format "is an art form."

So is speaking through burps. Again, any attempt to defend Tweets as some kind of new American haiku runs up against the reality of site. Here's that great 21st century New York Twitter version of the haiku poet Basho, known as "aliglia": "OMG, I want brownies! When are we having dinner again? :)"

It may not be true that only morons are drawn to Twitter, but everyone on Twitter sounds like a moron.

It could be that the best Twitter has to offer -- delicious prose, supernovas of self- and communal knowledge -- are visible only near the top of the Twitter hierarchy (defined in Twitterville as those with the most followers). Let's check out the Twitter feed of CNN's Rick Sanchez, a legend in the Twitter community for incorporating the site into his cable news program.

See more stories tagged with: twitter, social media

Alexander Zaitchik is a freelance journalist.

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