Twitter Intellectuals

Rob Horning pointed out how Twitter has changed the way he reads and analyzes articles on the Net, or rather how he doesn’t do those things anymore:
“Now, when I hit upon an article that starts me thinking, I excerpt a sentence of it on Twitter and start firing off aphoristic tweets….At worst, tweeting pre-empts my doing any further thinking, since I am satisfied with merely charting the response.”

Next look at Jennifer Guevin’s complaint about how “snap judgments at warp speed are ruining the Internet”. She cites the following example:
“A dude at a tech conference tweets a picture of a woman's feet in stilettos, and judges her to be brainless based on the fact that she is wearing said footwear. Predictably, outrage ensues.”
Neither side of the “rage war” that followed on Twitter, Guevin says, stops to factor in that nobody can really convey their point, let alone subtleties, in 140 characters. Is it not possible, asks Guevin, that the guy who tweeted was an:
“equality-loving guy who thought damning high heels might help absolve women of feeling they need to wear them”?
In any case, aren’t tweeters forced to adopt:
“the snide tone that is the face of humor in social media”?
Based on just 140 characters, can anyone be absolutely sure whether the intent was public shaming or a call to say “Hey, ladies, you can wear more comfortable outfits and we'll still respect you for your minds”?

Guevin feels Twitter reduces us to childish behavior:
“I feel as though I've reverted to grade school -- like we're all issuing a collective "Ooooh, burrrrrrn. You got her good”

Derek Powazek, on the other hand, asks the question:
“Say you’re a supervillian. Your goal is not to take over the world, but to create more unpleasantness. So you set out to create a device that would ensnare normal, rational people and turn them into ranting lunatics. What would your Argument Machine look like?”
and comes to the conclusion:
“I think you get my point by now. Yes, I’m talking about Twitter. I’m not saying that Twitter was designed to create arguments. I’m just saying that, if you set out to create an Argument Machine, it’d come out looking a lot like Twitter.”

Perhaps Nicholas Carr was right when he wrote:
“The Twitter intellectual is a strange new species.”

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