Where will Twitter take us?

Michael Jackson died and the protests in Iran faded from view. Apparently the young people had had enough of their protest/rock concert and went back home to their parents, their studies and their friends. Or their struggle is not worthy enough anymore, after all we have found something else to occupy and amuse us.

So what happened to the Twitter revolution?  When the protests in Iran started everyone was convinced that Twitter was going to herald something glorious and new, that it was the new tool of social change leading to some imagined paradise.  

Twitter is changing the way in which we get news and it helps us convey information to people faster than we did before.  In this respect this new technology, like all new technologies alters human behavior to some extent.  This alteration has  consequences and they are not quite what we imagine.  It is common in our popular culture to have faith in technology and to spin stories involving technology to suggest something glorious. 

Twitter allows us to get news from people who are at the events as they happen. Almost everyone has a cell phone now and almost everyone can text a message. So we do not have to wait long for someone at the scene of anything to report what happened. With enough people making these reports the business of news reporting gets even more redundant.  We do not need to wait for the next days newspaper to find out the news of the previous day, we don’t even need to tune into a 24 news channel.   Just check your twitter feed and see what is happening. We get to be even more selective about what news we read and why.  

Twitter also allows a way to reach people instantly.  So as in the case of the demonstrations in Iran it was much easier to get people together, to know where and when people were gathering.

So we get news instantly from ‘citizen’ journalists. For this gain we lose professionalism and life experience. A citizen journalist gets paid nothing for his or her tweet. So he or she has no reason or obligation to either tweet the truth or to maintain any kind of standards.  Since there is no longer any need for professional journalists the profession is dying and with it goes the possibility of depth. Depth that comes from experience, the perspective that say someone who has covered the middle east for 25 years can have.  

We get to connect with people instantly.  This has a powerful allure because it creates an immediate sense of community, something that every human being enjoys.   This immediate sense creates a brief, strong rush.  But this is the ultimate disposable community. You connect briefly for very specific reasons and then will likely never hear from most of the people you have connected with. There is no social contract behind the connection; anyone can break it off when they want.  In practice that means you cannot trust anyone as no one has any sense of duty towards you.

We have only 24 hours in a day and can handle only so many rushes before we will burn out.   If we give our allowed store of ‘rush’ energy to these brief immediate rushes we cannot give energy to things that hold the possibility of more lasting value. 

With Twitter getting this immediate rush is easy to get and so easily taken. Our mistake is to assume this rush has some grand significance.

Technology is neutral and the way we use it determines its effects on us.   Already Iran has faded from the news, and we have moved on to other immediate rushes.  No real change happened, it was all sound and fury signifying nothing.  Our ADHD grows and we miss much.  So this is the likely consequence of Twitter: a world five miles wide and an inch deep, where we scream loudly at any and every new ‘hip’ thing but our scream means absolutely nothing, behind the scream is only emptiness.