Twitter's a great tool, but...

Twitter's a great tool (I don't actually use it, but whatever), but it's just a tool. Just like blogs are just a tool.

We're constantly hearing about how blogs are changing politics and political discourse, and that's true. But we usually hear about it in the context of how blogs are making it worse. That is, that it's cheapening the discourse and/or increasing the amount of noise (i.e., bluntness) in political criticism, media criticism, etc.

But blogs are just the communications tool being used. And bloggers are just the people using them, but who used to use other tools. As I've written before, the things that journalists get pissed off reading on the blogs (especially when what they're reading is criticism of their work) are the same things people used to say to each other at the water cooler at work (before the coolers were eliminated as a cost saving measure) or over the telephone, or whatever. It's just that the journalists were protected from hearing it before. Most people pretty much always think stuff sucks, and freely say so. Blogs just made it possible for them to say so in a way that someone could later show to a journalist. Same goes for politicians.

I'm interested in the abstract (but not enough to actually participate, so far) by the growing use of Twitter by politicians and journalists. It's interesting that they've flocked so rapidly to a medium that actually gives them less space to explain themselves than the ones they already had, but I guess you can just keep sending 140 characters (or whatever it is) over and over again, and thereby actually tell people something of interest.

But the same truth applies here: Twitter's just the tool, and users are just the same people who used to use other tools instead.

Here's what brought me to this: Glenn Thrush at Politico was intrigued by George Stephanopoulos' use of Twitter to pose a question to fellow Twitter-er (Tweeter?) Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO). Stephanopoulos asked McCaskill why she voted against the FY09 omnibus appropriations bill, and she ticked off a couple reasons.

Then Thrush posits an observation and a question arising from this:

But George's query represents, it seems to me, a logical challenge for a technology that has created a new, novel and closely monitored semi-public space.

McCaskill has generated great publicity with her entertaining and often candid Tweets -- clearly enhancing her political reputation (at least with reporters) through the medium. So doesn't that give reporters the right to use the same space to pose hard-nosed questions?

I'm not entirely sure what the "challenge" is here, but maybe that's just not exactly the right word. No matter, I get the point. It's interesting that they're using this new tool to communicate.

The question that arises, though, is sort of interesting in two ways. It's really two questions. One, doesn't McCaskill's use of the medium give reporters the right to use the same space to ask questions?

Answer: Yes, of course. The same way it gives reporters the right to question a Senator at a press conference. "Hi, I'm Claire McCaskill, and this is what I'm doing today. By the way, I'm a Senator."

Do you have "the right" to ask that person something in a two-way communications medium? Why is that even a question?

Question two: Can reporters use the same space to pose hard-nosed questions?

Answer: That's not actually a hard-nosed question. Is it? Asking a Senator why she voted a certain way on a certain bill?

It's a good question. But hard-nosed? Isn't that sort of the most basic possible question you could ask about a vote?

And that's how we get back to the original point. What's transformative about a medium that enables journalists to ask Senators why they voted the way they voted? Does it really make the question more hard-nosed because it was asked in a medium normally reserved for asking, "wut up?"

There's nothing transformative there, of course. But because it's done using a new technological tool, it's regarded by people who have heretofore approached online communications with some suspicion as being something entirely different from their communications in the past. And the people who engage in its use are viewed as some new species of animal.

Maybe the best thing that can come out of this move to Twitter is the realization by the people who have been so suspicious of blogs and bloggers that they're really not doing anything different than they were ever doing. They're communicating just the same, but with new tools.

The worst thing that could come out of it, though, would be for them to fail to see that, and to continue to regard the use of Twitter as something entirely removed from normal communications. Cuz it got little buttons 2 push n stuff.

by David Waldman aka Kagro X

Try deep web search to find more info