Twitterers Tweet Back at AlterNet

By Tana Ganeva, AlterNet. Posted February 24, 2009.

Twitter, like many technologies that have come before, is either hailed as a glorious revolution in communication or slammed as a destroyer of intelligent public discourse. When one of the more popular Twitter streams consists of Ashton Kutcher's illiterate dispatches from boozie Oscar parties, it's easy to side with the naysayers.

But in its relatively brief existence Twitter has also exploded into a political discussion forum, a venue for on-the-scene reporting, and a place for activist organizing (not to mention an opportunity for tech-challenged Republican politicians to hilariously embarrass themselves).

In a piece recently published on AlterNet, Alexander Zaitchik tears down the hype surrounding Twitter, critiquing news outlets that gush over the site in order to seem "with-it". Zaitchik argues that Twitter promotes a mindless narcissism that further corrodes our already dumbed-down public culture: "It may not be true that only morons are drawn to Twitter, but everyone on Twitter sounds like a moron."

The piece, unsurprisingly, drew a lot of criticism from AlterNet's Twitter followers. Zaitchik's take on the site also prompted tons of comments on AlterNet.

Many of the article's Twitter critics say that Zaitchik misunderstands how the site works (in under 140 characters, of course):

Winning_mark writes: "Actually shocking how shallow AlterNet scratches the Twitter surface. So very much ignored."

Bigmind reminds Zaitchik of the wise words of Marshall McLuhan: "Zaitchik needs to reread McCluhan's "The Medium is the Massage" I'd say more but I'm running out of characters!"

The idea that Zaitchik misses the point by taking individual tweets as the sum of the whole network is echoed by chutry in a longer blog post to which he links on Twitter:

As others have pointed out, articles that complain about Twitter typically focus on the content of individual tweets rather than focusing on those tweets in a specific context. It would be similar to denigrating conversation by pulling out individual pieces of dialogue rather than seeing how conversation involves a variety of practices: connecting with others, sharing ideas, linking to blog posts, participating in mini-memes, whatever.

Many AlterNet commenters also disagree with Zaitchik's critical take on the site:

Gazooks writes that Twitter is only the latest mass culture trend wrongly accused by critics of dooming civilization:

In the hierarchy of threats, this seems more than a bit overstated. The hula hoop was considered a useless, mindless, mass threat by some as is nearly everything that achieves fad status.

Is it startling that so many lives are dominated in a schoolgirl continuum of the trivial and mundane, and hasn't that always been the case?

People need connection and this seems to enable an expression of what moves them on a basic level.

jnelson4765 agrees:

Twitter is not some secular Antichrist come to steal the souls of the creative and replace them with slack-jawed moron doppelgangers communicating with grunts and moans. It's a public graffiti wall, where you can leave notes to your friends, or see what other people are up to.

Are some people taking it way too far? Yes. Does it require this kind of concentrated vitriol? Is it really a sign of the Idiocracy apocalypse, or is it just IRC done with text messages? IRC can be just as stupid, banal, and far more offensive than anything Twitter puts out, but it's still used by a lot of computer people to coordinate projects and get tech support.

See more stories tagged with: culture, internet, twitter, social media

Tana Ganeva is an assistant editor at AlterNet.

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