Matt Bai, whose book The Argument offered invaluable reporting and insight about the rise of progressive online activism this decade, has a skeptical take on Twitter in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine. Following a tenuous comparison to ex-Sen. Bob Graham’s infamous, meticulous journaling and a swipe at Sen. Claire McCaskill’s “chatty” tweeting habits, Bai concludes:
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.”
Links, Context and Little Green Footballs
The New York Times Sunday Magazine this weekend features a long article about the fallout between Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs fame and the rest of the anti-jihadist rightosphere. If nothing else it provides a solid overview for anyone who has noticed LGF’s change in focus over the past year, or read his November post “Why I Parted Ways With the Right” but didn’t remember too much about the controversy surrounding the presence of a representative from fringe Finnish political party Vlaams Belang at a 2007 Brussels conference that presaged it. You can get a good sense of the dispute by reading posts by Johnson and his enemies at Memeorandum; for context, I especially recommend Patterico and R.S. McCain.
But what interests me even more is the intellectual framework writer Jonathan Dee imposes on the proceedings. While there certainly appears to be a personal element involved for Johnson — one Dee apparently wasn’t quite able to crack — there is also the possibility that events occurred as they did because the Internet elevates the importance of links and the act of linking, opening the possibility for the forging of novel (and possibly false) relationships. On the Internet, the possibility of creating new contexts is limited only by any one person’s imagination. It’s impossible for me to say whether this is true in Johnson’s case, but Dee at least presents a persuasive case.
Key excerpts:
Fans of Don DeLillo may recall the final pages of his 1997 novel “Underworld” (no relation to the graphic novels, film series nor English techno artists) where the characters Sister Edgar and J. Edgar Hoover are joined for eternity in cyberspace, “a single fluctuating impulse now, a piece of coded information. Everything is connected in the end.” Well, I did, anyway.
Meanwhile, Dee makes a secondary point that this blurring of context may contribute to a conflation of conflicting perceptions which one may find too often in online discourse:
I cannot say that is what is happening here — I’m certainly not about to be pulled into a discussion of Vlaams Belang. And while misreadings of intentions are not new to online discourse, I think there is a “flattening effect” or, to borrow a metaphor from television, “time-shifting” of opinion which can sometimes confuse more than enlighten. Such confusion may be innocent, but it is also open to exploitation. With no information online separated by more than a few clicks, anyone can choose their own context. And in the blogosphere, some choose contexts incompatible with others’ — even if only for the sake of argument.