Addendum

It might be that I'm feeling sensitive because Gen just requested transfer from being my permanent croquet teammate via my family email list serve (citing irreconcilable differences - aka my play at Thanksgiving), or maybe it's that I don't see the connection between twitter, the Kansas City Royals, Roger Ebert, and the Holocaust, but I have a few things to add to Gen's post.

First, Gen's whole theory about me being afraid of technology is utterly preposterous and unfair! Great - I don't know how to use our DVR, once I "slightly overstuffed" the DVD player, my blackberry troubles me, and I recently managed to set our sink's garbage disposal on fire. That doesn't make me afraid of the future or "an enemy of progress," it just means that we child proofed our apartment and Gen is allowed to feel big and important on a daily basis when I ask him to help me with things involving bandwidths and touch buttons. AND I would also point to a certain trip when our car broke down in the Shenandoah Mountains with nary a soul for miles around at a bend in the road where there were frequent angry mother bear sightings and we had no cell phone reception, and it wasn't Gen's I-Phone that saved us (despite all his efforts) but rather my wilderness instincts.

Regardless, my addendum is just to note that twitter's new found revolution inducing capabilities may have been somewhat conflated. Maybe I'm pulling a Malcolm Gladwell (See "Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not be Tweeted"), but I just don't completely agree with how twitter and other forms of social media have been portrayed in the common narrative regarding the civil unrest sweeping the Arab world.

Little Nadia wanted to start an anarchic revolution. Unfortunately, twitter hadn't yet been invented.

Maybe I'm missing something. I think the phenomenon is... yes, mildly interesting. I don't find it fascinating - is it that surprising that this generation (and others) enjoys using something that allows them to overshare, reduce every complex thought to a sentence (in sum - arguably- : be lazy), and be easily in touch with their friends?

But I am bothered by the fact that the credit Twitter is getting for recent upheaval is often lacking in real analysis. Clearly, twitter is a positive development, has played a role in a number of large-scale events, and is a useful technology/service, with proven potential to enable communication and organization (good example in recent Nigerian elections). That said, several revolutions occurred without twitter. The Berlin wall didn't come down because a Gustav somewhere tweeted "let's take that bad boy down." and his friend Olga saw it and re-tweeted the call to arms, right below a link to her favorite siberian tiger zooborn. 1968 in Europe, 1979, 1848, the Prague Spring, etc. all happened prior to myspace creeps, Winkel-Vi, and @sillymoniker. As this article points out, the jury's still out on exactly how useful social media was to the Iran unrest of two summers ago.

I'm all for what twitter can do. I don't disagree with the idea that Twitter deserves play in the dialogue about recent events but I think it's going a bit far to call something a "twitter revolution" and I would love to see a bit more discussion taking into account social media's other characteristics, their tangible impact, and for the media and Americans generally to be as excited about other factors at play as a revolution unfolds (e.g. the impact of civil society organizations, the dynamics of formerly rival group cooperation, the economic effects when people drop what they're doing and take to the streets, etc). These tools foster rapid coordination and give people windows into someone's activities oceans away but they're not the sole force/impetus/structure/link/what have you behind a political movement and certainly don't make for regime change by virtue of existing.

Twitter lets someone say something quickly, in soundbites, to one's "followers," and link to further information with immediacy. But it doesn't prompt debate in the way that in-person discussion does. It allows for anonymity which can cut both ways. It's also worth pointing out that it's not just citizens that benefit from twitter - it can also be authoritarian regimes who know what they're doing. Further, such technologies mean an inundation of information, some of it meaningless, which has real possibility but can also lead to what I'm not really sure how to term as anything else but internet buzz fatigue. Not to mention that Twitter won't write constitutions in new democracies, it won't train people to step into new business sector roles to replace a former dictator's cronies, and its word limit mean that it will never be long enough to be this beautiful.... and apparently it's bad for your sex life.