The Twitter Crusade

Sometimes Twitter, with its speed and brevity and din of voices, makes old-media types uncomfortable. This week, the New York Times has taken up a mini-crusade against the service, beginning with Maureen Dowd’s awkward interview/op-ed and continuing in yesterday’s Sunday Magazine. There, political correspondent Matt Bai wonders if D.C. should be declared a “Twitter-free zone” where politicians are asked to deliver substantive, extended discourse—instead of the fleeting slice-of-life vignettes Twitter-ticians like Sen. Claire McCaskill seem to prefer. (Yesterday’s post: “Oh happy day.Newspapers coffee screened porch jazz birds chirping gorgeous spring day with my family in the state I love.I’m one lucky gal.”)Bai’s call for deeper dialogue, though it seems like a good idea, is built on a claim that that’s what voters want. “[V]oters seem to have tired of what pollsters call the ‘understands people like me,’ question,” he writes. “Now, it seems, they want politicians to stop sharing and just govern like adults.” Does it seem? Bai offers no back-up for this point, and last time I scoured the headlines (albeit, I admit, on the web) they were filled with talk of the president’s dog and just how delightful his wife is. Now the Internet push-back has arrived. Twitter allows collaboration in politics, argues Micah Sifry, such as Election Day monitoring and conversation built around hashtags. But Bai himself concedes that Twitter’s connective capacity can be useful to spread news or fight repression. He simply says that politician’s chattering Tweets don’t offer much to improve politics—that for polticians, the service is at best another campaign tool, another way to project the tired everyman image.In that regard, I think Bai is right. While Twitter can be—and has been—politically productive, that seems to happen from the ground up, not from politicians down. But as the world speeds up, so too will politicians. As elections cycle on, more and more politicians will be on Twitter—to chat, to talk policy, to declare their candidacy. So rather than take up battle lines condemning the service or defending its usefulness, we should probably learn to live with it—figure out how to have our 140-character chats but have our deeper discourse, too.