Twitter Nation Has Arrived: How Scared Should We Be?

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

Here's Sanchez Twittering to his viewers last week: "anybody got anything real good out there, btw.. thanks for tip on dentist kid.. wow that funny!"

Some say the glorious potential of Twitter will be fully realized in bite-sized Twitter citizen journalism. My AlterNet colleague Rory O'Conner has studied the evolving impact of social-network media on the news business and concluded that sites like Twitter are "not only supplementing but supplanting" traditional news. As others have done, O'Conner notes that that the first photo of U.S. Airways flight 1549 in the Hudson was posted not on the New York Times site, but on TwitPic.

"When it comes to breaking news -- from heroism on the Hudson to terror in Mumbai to calamity in California -- Twitter leads the pack these days," writes O'Conner. "Twitter has become a go-to source of news you can use when and where you want and need it -- often when and where the legacy media cannot yet or no longer supplies it."

It's true that Twitter has been used to get information out during crises. But so what? Does that make it journalism? When people started calling in stories to their editors by phone, did we start talking about "AT&T journalism?" And imagine if telephones only allowed you to speak for 8 seconds before cutting you off. Whatever events Twitter may allow us to report a few minutes faster, it is still limiting that reportage to a space that can't even hold an Associated Press wire blurb about a minor bomb blast in Sri Lanka.

When the Los Angeles Times ran a Twitter feed about local wildfires on its home page, it was an informational service to its readers that was distinct from and complementary to its coverage. It was not, let us hope, "the future of journalism." Efforts to use Twitter as a vehicle for first-person reportage with voice -- Slate tried to cover the Olympics this way, Talking Points Memo lamely tweeted the inaugural parties -- have been laughably bad and quickly aborted.

The problem with Twitter Journalism is the same as with communication. Twitter can provide stick-figure snapshots, nothing more. Worse, the constant posting and following of these snapshots takes up lots of precious time, sucking up and fracturing the dwindling number of solid blocks of minutes that remain after checking e-mail, Facebook, Myspace, and other now-routine diversions.

But Twitter is unique and more dangerous because of the rolling, inherently content-less and bite-sized nature of the tweets. It reflects and feeds an autistic culture unable to focus on anything but the tiny feed box in front of it, and even that only when medicated. Programs like Tweetdeck (currently in public beta) are working to perfect a permanent desktop scroll and filter -- an intravenous Twitter drip.

It takes a feat of dark imagination to look at Twitter and see art, the future of journalism or a gigantic shared-consciousness project. The thing Twitter reminds me of most is Mike Judge's under-appreciated 2006 satiric masterpiece, Idiocracy. The story revolves around an Army private, played by Luke Wilson, who wakes up in the year 2506. This future America is defined by its stupidity: nobody can read, write or think for more than a few seconds at a time. There is a prolonged national drought because a popular power-drink called Brawndo ("It's got electrolytes!") is being used to water the crops.

On his first day exploring this idiotic future, Wilson wanders into a movie theater, where a new film is playing, titled Ass. The movie consists entirely of a stationary shot of a man's ass, which farts at irregular intervals. The audience is laughing hysterically. In Judge's dystopia, Ass wins eight Oscars, including Best Screenplay. Idiocracy ends with Wilson as president giving a rousing State of the Union speech:

There was once a time in this country a long time ago, when people wrote books and movies in which you cared whose ass it was—and why it was farting. And I believe that day can come again.

When future generations are watching movies in which it's not clear whose ass is farting, or why, we'll look back at Twitter as a milestone. But we won't be using the word "fart." We'll call them "tweets."

And then we'll giggle like the Japanese schoolgirls we've become.

See more stories tagged with: twitter, social media

Alexander Zaitchik is a freelance journalist.

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