If Twitter doesn’t turn out to be just the latest political fad (like, say, psychographic polling, or Ron Paul), then it just may be the worst thing to happen to politics and its attending media since a couple of geniuses at CNN dreamed up “Crossfire” back in the 1980s. It’s not that Twitter doesn’t have a value to society. Its ability to spread news (as in the emergency landing of a plane in the Hudson River) or to circumvent repression (as in Moldovan youths organizing protests) has already proved transformative. But not every new mode of communication lends itself to politics, where speed and complexity rarely coexist. The capital might be a better place if it became a Twitter-free zone, a city where people spent more time talking to the guy serving the coffee and less time informing the world that the coffee had, in fact, been served.

This is in the right ballpark, but it’s still a foul ball. For one thing, as I’ve explained before, the Moldovan protests were not principally organized on Twitter, yet Bai’s mention here indicates it is likely to become a popular media myth for some time to come.

And though Blog P.I. has been recently accused of engaging in Twitter triumphalism, I’ve also made the point that Twitter is best as a way to create and communicate the existence of connections between messages and ideas rather than to communicate complete thoughts — “more medium than message,” as I’ve put it.

It’s not that Twitter does not “lend itself to politics”; it’s that Twitter does not lend itself to explanations of concepts or, typically, careful debate about such issues. Bai notes that Twitter is good for its ability to spread news, but this hyperconnectivity has as many implications as there are kinds of information that can be tweeted.

Here I must clarify my statement that Twitter is not ideal for debate, because I have seen it work. Not quite a year ago, Personal Democracy Forum co-sponsored a Twitter debate between representatives from the Obama and McCain campaigns (including my future NMS colleague Liz Mair). And sometime last year — I can’t quite seem to locate it — I watched a fascinating debate about gay marriage between Michael Turk and Gregory Cole. Just this past week, Evan McMorris-Santoro at The Hotline conducted a “Twitterview” with ex-DNC chairman/VA governor candidate Terry McAuliffe. McAuliffe’s replies were necessarily curtailed and so not terrifically informative, but there’s something unique about holding this kind of interview in a public setting, where anyone can comment on the discussion, even as it is occurring.

Twitter Search is necessary but not sufficient for presenting the full scope of discussion for readers arriving after the live event. Better tools for organizing and displaying these conversations on blogs are needed, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this is where the Twitter API is headed next. Already there are editorial services like McMorris-Santoro’s Word on the Tweet and Danny Glover’s Hill Tweet News. Another interesting question is whether 140-character tweets are too short to be made sense of by mostly algorithm-driven aggregators like Gabe Rivera’s Memeorandum (and Techmeme). Hashtags combined with Slashdot-style meta moderation may be key to making such a service realistically work.

The point here is that it can. Bai and others see Twitter’s 140-character limitation without giving consideration to the unlimited possibilities for development of the platform. And here I’ll risk borrowing from one of the hoariest clichés in business and technology to say: you have to think outside the tweet.

Given the choice between “Crossfire” and Twitter, I know which one I’d pick.

N.B. I will say this for Matt Bai: at least he made an honest effort to understand Twitter for what it is, unlike this inane interview/column by (who else but) Maureen Dowd, wherein Twitter’s Biz Stone comes off a thoughtful fellow under MoDo’s faux-withering interrogation. If you subject yourself to reading it, I recommend as antidote Nancy Friedman’s parody, “Ms. Dowd Interviews the Inventor of the Telephone.”

It’s the busy season for Internet conferences, with SXSWi recently concluded,* Personal Democracy Forum just ahead and the District’s own PoliticsOnline annual conference sponsored by the Institute for Politics Democracy and the Internet (IPDI) at George Washington University. I was a panelist once during my time writing The Blogometer, if you need any more reason to take it seriously.

Well, here’s one more — IPDI is announcing a new panel that sounds to this blogger as interesting as anything covered in Austin, Texas last weekend. From the announcement e-mail:

[H]ow many of us have actually looked at the user experiences of Members of Congress, as they work through the highs and lows of social media in political office?

Or asked a Senator what it felt like to post the tweet heard around the country?

Now you can.

Join Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Rep. John Culberson (R, TX-7), Rep. Steve Israel (D, NY-2), Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R WA-5), and Rep. Tim Ryan (D, OH-17) for “Elected and Connected: Uses, Dangers, and Benefits of Being an Elected Official in a 2.0 World” on Tuesday, April 21, 2009 at 8:30 a.m. at the 2009 Politics Online Conference.

As alluded to here before, expectations that our duly elected congresscritters would take to blogging (as opposed to merely commissioning staff-written blogs) never did pan out, owing in largest part I believe to time constraints and authenticity. Then-Senator Obama’s lengthy commentary/response at/to Daily Kos in 2005 may stand alone in this regard, although I still suspect he did not write it alone.

YouTube has generated more member participation but still is mostly the product of their staff. Twitter on the other hand is entirely intelligible and within the capacity of anyone familiar with a BlackBerry, which nearly all of them are. Here, for the first time, members of Congress may actually have something to say about social media. Not to mention, Culberson (@johnculberson) and McCaskill (@clairemc) are widely considered among the savviest Twitter users on the Hill.

All sounds interesting to me, and if you agree, you can register online here.

*So if you were wondering why this blog went silent for a week, now you know.