Twitter is Stupid

Or maybe I just don’t understand it.  But seems to me that it’s premised on two conflicting notions: that you have something so significant to say that it needs to be shared with a lot of people quickly, yet its significance can be captured in 140 characters or less.

Right or wrong, that’s a pretty simple and concise thought, but I couldn’t have expressd it in just one tweet. 

After Osama bin Laden was killed a football player got in trouble when he tweeted something about how strange it was to watch people celebrate someone’s death.  That didn’t go over very well at all with his Twitter followers (I think that’s the proper term, although this story makes it seem like an odd choice).  The player lost an endorsement contract, and his team rushed out a statement distancing itself from his comments.  He took a beating in the press, on blogs, and on various social media sites.

Before I learned about this incident I had been in a few conversations with well-informed, thoughtful and, in the fullest sense of the term, patriotic people who were uncomfortable with the public displays of joy over bin Laden’s death.  These conversations were not artificially limited in length or context, and they were interactive. 

So when I heard what the football player tweeted that got him into hot water, my first reaction was to feel a little sorry for him.  But you really can’t win points for reflection or nuance when you’re using Twitter.  He brought it on himself and probably deserved his public flogging.

First of all, shouldn’t an athlete with followers on Twitter assume that his fans are interested in him as an athlete and not as political or social commentator?  Secondly, why would someone attempt to address such a delicate and controversial issue without really knowing who he would be talking to, let alone without the capacity to go into the kind of depth the topic requires?    

Here’s the real problem – Twitter is part, maybe a big part, of the dumbing down of our public discourse.  We have all of these really serious and complex problems that need to be confronted by an informed electorate demanding bold action from politicians able to look beyond the next election to what is in our long term interests.  Instead, we increasingly talk to and about each other in grunts, whether on angry talk radio or cable “news” show, or assorted electronic means that encourage brevity and discourage real interaction.

What was that Donald Trump thing all about?  How does that guy spend more than a few minutes being considered a potential presidential candidate?  And where’s the reality in his reality TV show?  If you were watching us from a distance and trying to figure out how we’re going to deal with the fiscal crisis, the economy, health care, failing schools, climate change, the war on terror, or immigration, how odd would it seem that Donald Trump managed to garner so much attention for way too much time without ever seriously addressing any of our real problems?

I’m not blaming Twitter for Trump.  Trump’s our own fault.  But if we don’t do a better job of talking about our problems, understanding the differences among us, and learning more about how to address them, we’ll continue to be distracted by nonsense and noise.  Twitter is a mostly a toy, and when traditional media outlets, government agencies, nonprofits, and policy makers play with it to reach their audiences and constituents they run the risk of diminishing the quality of that interaction.