American Consequences - August 2019

HOW TWITTER DESTROYED POLITICS

know how terrible service is at the post office right this minute. A Twitter landmark that set the tone for much of what was to follow occurred in 2010, when a reporter for the website Mediaite “live-tweeted” his own heart attack. “I gotta be me,” he actually tweeted, mid-infarction. “Livetweeting my own heart attack. Beat that!” No one has beaten that, as far as I know. Back in the Blog Age, the lag time between the moment a blogger put his passing thought into words and its appearance on everyone else’s screen could last several minutes. As we entered the Twitter Age, such a delay was deemed simply intolerable. Twitter was On the one hand, Twitter tempts them to express every thought that passes through what’s left of their minds. more or less instantaneous. What remained of the filter between composition (I use the term loosely) and publication vanished altogether... Self-censorship – what used to be called discretion and tact – seemed to run contrary to the animating spirit of Twitter. The technology bred a contagion among political commentators that resembles a kind of epidemic of Tourette’s Syndrome. But it’s complicated... On the one hand, Twitter tempts them to express every thought that passes through what’s left of their minds. On the other hand, the constraints of the technology and its immediacy ensure that no thought can be fully ventilated, placed in a larger context, and supported with argument and evidence. It’s lose-lose!

the Internet with all the evident authority of a papal bull, if papal bulls ran to a maximum of three paragraphs. Not for the blogger was the rehearsal of a chain of logic, the marshaling of facts, the adducing of argument and counterargument and rebuttal that you were once led to expect (and, it’s true, often failed to find) in political polemics. A blog post was pure assertion. Even better, anybody could earn the title of “blogger” without having to be screened by, prove talent to, or gain credentials from employers, editors, fact- checkers, or even readers. As it happened, the age of the blog was almost as short-lived as a blog post. After a few years of reading blogs, the national attention span (and I’m thinking in particular of the attention span of people who follow politics for a living or as a serious hobby) had shrunk to such an extent that Twitter became possible – indeed, necessary, and eventually indispensable. By contrast, blogs seemed so gabby – yap, yap, yap. When it went online in 2006, Twitter wouldn’t allow a post longer than 140 characters... not words, characters . The tweet limit was doubled to 280 characters several years later, and many Twitter users objected to the move. Expanding the permissible length of tweets struck them as an insult – a stumbling block to the steady, uninterrupted advance of the cause of human stupidity. (It didn’t make much difference one way or the other.) Twitter had a particular appeal to the oversharers among us, people who think they can add to the sum total of human happiness by showing strangers photos of their half- eaten bowls of pad thai or letting everyone

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August 2019

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