In Defense of Twitter
There has been a lot of talk about Twitter in the news lately. From Ashton Kutcher talking about how great Twitter is to communicate with his fans to Maureen Dowd’s insulting editorial in the Wall Street Journal, everybody is all a twitter about Twitter.
I have been using Twitter for two years now and I still don’t trust it to exist next month, much less change the freakin’ world (for better or worse). All of this seems like too much talk for what I consider a tool. It’s a very useful tool for me, but it’s a tool none the less.
Geoff Manaugh at BLDGBLOG said exactly what I was thinking:
The comparison I often make here is with ball-point pens.
Imagine a world where everyone uses typewriters: they write novels, manifestos, historical surveys, and so on, but they do it all using typewriters.
Now the ball-point pen comes along. People use it to write down grocery lists and street addresses and recipes and love notes. What is this awful new technology? the literary users of typewriters say. Ball-point pens are the death of humanism.
Nevermind, of course, that you can use ball-point pens to write whatever you want: a novel, a screenplay, epic poems, religious prophecy, architectural theory, ransom notes. You can draw astronomical diagrams, sketch impossible machines for your Tuesday night art class, or even work on new patent applications for a hydrogen-powered automobile – it doesn’t matter. You can draw penises on your coworker’s paycheck stub. It’s a note-taking technology.
Who cares if people use ball-point pens for writing down phone numbers and movie times, or even drawing little hearts on someone else’s notebook in the middle of English class? It doesn’t mean that they hate literature.
Similarly, who cares if someone uses Twitter to say that they’re bored, or to list what they ate last night? It doesn’t mean the barbarians are at the gates.
He goes on to point out that this is more about the media moguls casually inferring who does and does not have the write to publish their thoughts:
Finally, and perhaps most importantly of all, now that the other half writes, it seems comparable only to a kind of police action that the people who once thought they were the chosen writers, that they were this generation’s idea-smiths, are now so up in arms. Those other people – those everyday people who weren’t supposed to have thoughts, who aren’t known for reading David Foster Wallace or Dostoevsky or James Joyce, those overlooked people from whom we buy groceries, who fix our cars, clean our houses, and vote differently than we do – weren’t supposed to become writers.
Well, Maureen Dowd, I am the one who checked you out at K-Mart. I am the one who filled your prescriptions at the pharmacy. I am the one who tested your AIDS and cancer medications on animals. I am the one who processed your pharmacy claims at the insurance office. I am the one who sold you that nice house. I am the one who typed up your paperwork to build the electrical transmission lines that lead to your neighborhood. I am the one who burned the CDs of geological information about the oil in your car.
I think it’s MY turn to be a writer now. I might have a little more to talk about than you do.
Via: Twitter / Jason Alderman: “Twitter is just … a ball-point pen. Get over it.”