Twitter Sucks

I’ve been on Twitter since 2010.  That was the year I opened my solo practice, and my involvement on Twitter has been limited.  I post there whenever I come up with a blog post or when I find something significant to say, or whenever I just feel like yelling at someone, and after six-plus years of being a part of Twitter, I think I’ve reached a pretty significant conclusion:

Twitter sucks.

Twitter is our sound-bite, say-it-in-ten-seconds-or-don’t-say-it-at-all public discourse taken to the Nth degree.  It used to be that anything in our “out loud” voice needed to be condensed to an elevator speech--a sales pitch that you could deliver in the time it takes to get from the first floor to the tenth.  If you couldn’t do it in that time, it was too long, and it was time to go back to the drawing board.

But now, it’s worse because Twitter has made it worse.  Now, written discourse has to fit the same parameters as oral discourse.  Say it in 140 characters or we stop paying attention. As I see it, Twitter is, at least in part, responsible for the dumbing down of virtually everything in American politics, and Donald Trump’s rise can be directly traced to Twitter and the vast army that follows him.  Seriously, you think the die-hard Trumpsters are reading the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times?  These are people whose attention can’t be held for more than 140 characters, so Twitter is right up their alley.  How do I know this?  I made the huge mistake of responding to an alt-right darling (one with over 100k followers) when he suggested that Trump was “an outsider” by observing that Trump is a purported billionaire who lives in the unofficial capital of the United States, New York City.  At that point, I received a notice every time some moronic would-be white supremacist “favorited” his retort that “the jews” would never accept Trump and that was why he was an outsider.  Let’s just say I got a lot of notices over a period of a few days.

And none of this was worth anything.  None of it added anything to any genuine discussion.  The noise-to-signal ratio on Twitter is astounding.  If you could sign up for a news service and be guaranteed that 99.9% of what you received was pure b.s., you’d never sign up.  But that’s pretty much what you get with Twitter.  You can find out that Kanye West feels his phone somehow interferes with his creative space (funnily enough, he’s still Tweeting); that Ryan Seacrest, incredibly, has some 15 million people who give a crap what he’s doing and has to be taught how to take “the perfect selfie”; and that Twitter, itself, has the ninth largest number of followers of any Twitter user (how meta).

And that last item is the big one.  Media visibility, itself, is the key criterion for more media visibility.  Spout plenty of garbage, and you’ve got a platform to spout even more.  The quality of what you say doesn’t count; just the quantity.  By insisting on fewer than 141 characters per post, Twitter encourages quantity over quality.  Sure, you can argue that allowing only 140 characters forces the writer to focus on the subject and really get to the point of the post. And if you can find genius in the tweets of Kim Kardashian, more power to you.

But here’s what I say:  Twitter has no place in serious public discourse.  It’s a marketing tool.  The platform is too limited and has become too trivialized to allow for anything else, assuming it was ever good for anything else.  Serious candidates for public office should be ignoring it.  Serious discourse–of any kind–should ignore it. Don’t encourage the dull-brained ones who actually consider Twitter a news source because it’s not. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go post this on Twitter.