To Tweet or Not to Tweet, that is the 21st Century Question

Twitter is fascinating. Regardless of what you think about the value of expressing thoughts in 140 characters or less, how superficial it is to build your TweetDeck, you just cannot deny that the technology has been at the center of the most interesting, cosmic events of our time.

Think about it. Twitter broke the Japanese earthquake. Twitter keeps us updated on the most recent gossip of what Prince William and Kate Perry Bosworth Middleton are going to wear to the GREATEST WEDDING OF ALL TIME...OF ALL TIME! A lot of people care about this a great deal, I find it kind of disgusting that in such times of financial trouble, a country that is already broke and cutting benefits to the lower-middle class is willing to spend some ungodly amount of British pounds on a freaking wedding. However, I do appreciate the royal wedding for giving us no shortage of ecard ideas, like this:

So politically incorrect. IT WAS A SS UNIFORM, YOU DOLT! And yes, that kid is like third in line to the throne. This is the karmatic product of centuries of Royal Family inbreeding.

But I digress...Twitter fomented uprisings throughout the Middle East, the likes of which have not been seen in the region in hundreds of years. Revolutions used to take years to build. Now they take 140 characters, lobbed out into cyberspace. Some of you may think I'm being facetious here, but I'm not. When the government moves to shut down Twitter access in your country, here here and here, I think it is safe to say that we are seing a trend. Namely, Twitter is really pissing off despotic, iron-fisted authoritarian rulers.

RT@Angry_Disenfranchised_Egyptian: So you say you wanna revolution....?


Who wouldn't find this Twitter-mania fascinating? You have be a truly sour, out-of-touch with technology, and ignorant of progress person to not be intrigued by what is going on here. No, Nadia, I am not calling you out specifically here*, though sometimes I suspect that you fall in this group. In any case, I know you're skeptical. If you want to open your mind a bit (not just you, Nadia, but all the Twitter skeptics out there, I suggest you read Roger Ebert's column about his conversion: http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/06/tweet_tweet_tweet.html).

*Nadia called me after I posted to tell me that she was offended by this comment. Like, seriously offended. SO, like a fine print legal disclaimer let me put on my lawyering hat and say JUST TO BE PERFECTLY CLEAR, Nadia is not an enemy of progress. Repeat. JUST TO BE CLEAR.

For those of you familiar with my relatively inactive Twitter account, you may know that I follow the accounts of my favorite Kansas City athletes...(I swear this has a point, keep reading):

The night of August 3, 2009, current Kansas City Royals' shortstop Alcides Escobar twittered: "Just got Swept By Isotopes.....i'm out later guys"

And that, my friends, was the end of Alcides Escobar, #12 rated prospect in the nation, professional athlete, on Twitter. Finished. He left Twitter, and never came back. He is following no one.

On his own, he roams the Earth scratching out a post-Albuquerque Isotopes-sweep existence. I eagerly await "The Road 2", starring Alcides Escobar in place of Viggo.

During Europe's dark 20th century, there was a tradition fomented during the Holocaust and other continued massive displacements and genocides of ethic peoples, of scribbling notes on scraps of paper and throwing them out of trains, automobiles, anything moving. A kind of land-based message in a bottle, notifying the world of the current state of existence or your hopeful destination. Surprisingly, a good number of these notes were saved, even if they did not make it to their intended recipient. May Alcdies's note find its mark.

I feel kind of stupid using an athlete's twittering to segway into my final thought on this, namely, that I cannot help but think of all the Twitter messages sent from Libya, Yemen, Japan, Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, and Bahrain in the past few months, either that never made it to their recipient, or that still exist online but belong to a dead or missing sender. It's sad, but it is also comfortable thinking about how their intentions to record the craziness around them will be preserved for posterity online, or at least until Twitter's servers are destroyed.

At this point, I feel like I have been rambling on and on without a point. But my general point is that Twitter is here to stay and it adds a tremendous amount of value, both of the democratic and historical. Sure, there are a lot of shit Tweets out there, but they are perfectly avoidable. No different than spending your day at a Philadelphia professional sporting event: 38,000 of the 45,000 people there are legitimately terrible, terrible enough to vomit on little girls.** But those brave 7,000, well they are people who think deeply about the game around them. They are people who have interesting opinions that should, for the sake of humanity, be shared with the rest of the world. And if you multiply that fraction of people to include the billions of people who live on this planet, well then I think 140 characters is a perfectly reasonable capacity limitation for us to process the information provided by such people. One of the classic complaints about the internet has been that there is too much data for any reasonable person to sift through, that people, ahem, have to read entire 3,000 word blog entries to get the information they need. Twitter takes care of that problem with its text limitations and creative ways of referring people to other sources of information through retweets and links.

Twitter is our new record of our efforts, our triumphs and tribulations, our thoughts come to life. It is our new history, and we should embrace that.

That being said, Twitter is not perfect. Not even close. Imagine trying to distill a classic piece of literature to 140 words. Can't work. Twitter instead provides us with fragments of code that we have to piece together. I like this. As an undergraduate history major, I discovered that often my historical research only led to the discovery of fragments of stories. Those fragments provide more questions than answers, questions that usually cannot be answered unless you make a bucketload of assumptions to support a particular answer. That has not changed, but it's nice to know that those fragments are now part of an online community. Long live Twitter.

Respectfully,

Someone who is only capable of posting in >=3,000 characters



**Speaking of Philadelphia, I have a blog entry solely on the handful of virtues and trunkloads full of drawbacks of that city. For the sake of retaining my girlfriend, I have refrained from publishing it.