Twitter: How Could It Change Social Discourse?
It has taken me quite some time to come around to twitter. For a long time I avoided it because I thought it was so much trivialisation and hype. Now I think I've got it. And I want to share this journey of understanding with you. First, some background of where I'm coming from.
The medium within which we have our public discourse shapes the message. Prior to television (a generation that has almost passed from our midst now) the printed word was the dominant form of public discourse. A society whose public discourse is shaped by the print media is necessarily rational and reasonable (and literate!). 18th and 19th century America saw the beginning of mass education as the country strove for mass literacy. This goal was driven by the understanding that participation in the new democracy required the ability to read and write.
Reading is a rational activity. It is based in thought and understanding. Language guides thought. As you read a book your thoughts are guided by the language. As you listen to a speech your thoughts are guided by the language. 18th and 19th Century American print based society could endure upwards of 5 hours of public oratory based upon speeches delivered from carefully pre-written scripts. Could you imagine a public meeting today in America lasting that long and still having an audience? A hilarious idea.
The advent of the telegraph and photograph changed public discourse significantly. These two modes of communication are blended to perfection in television. When information of the 'News of The Day' is immediate from any corner of the globe it has no relevance (usually) to our daily lives. When information is delivered in sound bytes it is free of context, it is not tied to any function. The flow of information parading as news has nothing to do with its audience and requires no response. Further, the medium of television allows for no effective response. Previously information derived its importance from the possiblilty of action, with the rise of television information now derived its importance from simply knowing of facts and not about them or being able to act on them. It is no coincidence that the advent of crossword puzzles and other games such as 'Trivial Pursuit' occurred after television replaced print media as the dominant form of public discourse. For what else can we do with the volume of irrelevant information we assimilate each day? This irrelevancy makes Baekdal's experiment in avoiding traditional news sources and relying upon social media for his news seem reasonable. At least his news will be relevant to him!
The reliance upon images rather than language for social discourse further decontextualises the message. Images require no context. American society has been transformed into one bizarre arena for showbiz. Public life is shaped by emotion, by sound bytes of information without context or explanation, by image and image is everything. Rationality is suspended and appearance is elevated above all else.
The rise of the internet may offer hope of a return to public discourse based more on rationality and objectivity because much of the net is based upon text. This blog you are reading, and the many others, are all text based (the digital version of the printed word). When I blog others read. Sometimes they reply in comments and sometimes they have a longer more thought out response that may take the form of another blog post, which has a trackback to my original post. This is a virtual world version of the 18th and 19th century speakers in public domains exchanging ideas in the form of long speeches, each carefully thought out then delivered to be followed often by a carefully thought out and delivered response.
However the internet is not just text based. UM's Wave 4 report notices the rise of video. The internet has huge capacity to be purely visual and auditory. It is immediate and it has no space limitations. The medium that the internet is becoming is all of print, telegraph and television rolled into one new digital version. So how will it shape our public discourse? The answer to this question relies upon which of the many forms of communication offered by the net we choose to utilise most. I want to focus on Twitter as a growing medium for discourse, and one that is taken increasingly seriously by many people as a venue for social connection. Facebook has some attributes of Twitter in its status updates, but I will not focus on that here. One at a time!
Twitter has peculiar attributes that we need to be aware of when learning how it is best utilised in public discourse. If it were to be used as a full platform to provide discourse I fear that the discourse will necessarily be trivial and superficial. Let me explain why.
Twitter messages are limited to 140 characters. This simple reality should not be overlooked and has important implications. Messages via twitter are necessarily brief. They can have no context, they can have almost no explanation. They are sound bytes. A conversation using twitter can develop context, but in small sound bytes only. The conversation cannot have depth where explanation is excluded to such a degree, or is given in increments only and broken up by constant interruption by other unrelated messages.
I have seen very odd examples of 'chats' containing many people on twitter. The chats appear as disjointed comments. They can be full of insider jargon, a necessity where the message must be so brief but a barrier to the wider participation that the instigators, in choosing the public domain of twitter, may have wished for. These 'conversations' can barely be defined as such, with snippets of information absent of reasoning or explanation and with the assumption of prior knowledge for understanding. Can you really have a conversation with several people at once where you are allowed only 140 characters per message? It seems not, or at least, not with any depth.
I think the reason that people seem to think they can have a real conversation using Twitter as a venue is this: for a few generations now we have been used to life lived in sound bytes as television has shaped our public discourse. We think to live like this is normal and natural. We accept the constant flow of 'news' as important, although it has no effect on our daily lives and we can have little to no effect on the message or the outcomes. We have no option for action. We are left feeling powerless and impotent. Television is best if left to what it does best: entertainment. I believe the height of it's utility is 'Realiity TV'.
Twitters strongest point is that messages can contain links to other content on the net. A well written Twitter message to capture attention can bring many eyeballs to the content its linked to. This may generate a public discourse in another arena such as a blog where deeper meaning can be conveyed.
If we are to harness the potential of the net for the improvement of public discourse then we need to examine how our discourse has been limited by television and understand that we could have so much more depth now we are offered discourse based upon the printed word. If we use twitter as a medium for discourse and pretend that this discourse is serious we do ourselves a disservice. We are capable of better.
To utilise twitter best I'm now only following people whose interests converge with mine. If they have blogs, that's even better. Their tweets lead me to their writing which leads me to their comments which leads me to other peoples writing that interests me and so I increase the people I follow. Before I was following over 2,500 people and the tweets that interested me were drowned out in the noise of direct selling and irrelevancies. Now I get the message.
I have come to the conclusion that twitter is best as a message service. It is best when it alerts me to interesting content that is placed somewhere else. Occasionally it can be good at providing a snippet of an idea, such as a famous or new quote. It is hopeless for conversations.
