Manifest Density - have you heard of this Twitter thing?:
But it's been horrifying to watch Twitter evolve into a medium used for important (if not serious) communication. First and foremost, I am appalled by our legislators' embrace of a time-suck communication medium that is necessarily superficial, and (more perniciously) one that is so convincingly fake-democratic while actually just facilitating communication with rich, Apple-computer-owning white people like myself.
Its adoption by the mainstream media has been similarly off-putting. As a cheap and fun SMS interface for media outlets I have no beef with it; as a means of personal marketing for journalists, the pretense and lack of honesty is dismaying (Ezra's diagnosis of their motivations as being grounded in a desire to avoid being left behind by the next blog-like internet trend is dead-on, I think — we should thank god we were spared from a hypothetical David Gregory Tumblr). I'd say the median journotweet is something like "getting ready to sit down for an i/v w @spalin. the lady is a tough cookie!" when in fact it should be closer to "complaining abt blogs in line to pick up kids @ sidwell frnds. no poor people around!"
The medium's been a disaster for some of the better bloggers, too. There are a number of hilarious political writers who've tried to ply their wares in 140 characters or less and in the process ended up making their entire authorial voice sound like a cliche. This is not to say that tweets can't be hilariously funny. But if the medium that made your career is less restrictive, your Twittered communiques may just sound like hacky, "gah!"-filled Jon Stewart imitations. It is an almost unbelievably terrible medium for snark, but no one seems to have noticed.
1:46 PM
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