Are they serious? Twitter is making us amoral now? I used Twitter to stay updated on the Gaza offensive. Instead of numbing me, it made my heart ache for the senseless loss of life in a way that the mainstream media was not able to do.
Apparently, the researchers have some hard data to prove to me that I wasn’t actually emotionally touched by the tweets about Gaza, but I’m going to have to stick with my personal experience on this one.
Twitter gets a lot of flak from mainstream media – Newsweek badmouthed it a few months ago – but it even gets slammed by alternative media like the Daily Show. Current.com even has an animated lampoon titled “The Trouble with Twitters.” (Minus ten points for lame Star Trek reference.)
I thought the Daily Show’s satire was apt, as always. They take the time to make fun of elected officials who are using Twitter in less-effective ways. I have to agree with them there. The Trouble with Twitters, however, is a little meaner and less informed. Can Twitter be stupid? Sure it can. Can Twitter be inane? Absolutely. Does it have a terribly silly name? Yes. Yes it does. But Twitter, like all things in life, is what we make of it.
People often ask me what to do about annoying Twitter friends who tweet constantly about what they’re having for breakfast. The answer: don’t follow them. Only follow the people who have information you want.
Twitter isn’t a magical world of instant information and connections. It’s a tool, and very handy one at that. If you use Twitter to follow uninteresting, stilly people, then Twitter will be ineffective. If you use Twitter to connect with other people in your field, potential customers, intellectuals, news sources, etc. it can be a great benefit.
In that sense, it appears that most of the complaints about Twitter have more to do with the individual critics than with the social networking tool itself. Now, it’s been hard for me to defend something that is already wildly popular. (I’m more of an underdog kind of guy.) So, with that said, I’m going back to my amoral Twitter stream where @iancapstick is talking about a Tamil protest in Canada and @mikearama informed me that a clean up of uranium tailings near Moab, Utah has just begun.
