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> Twitter is making the news dumber. The service is insidery and clubby. It exacerbates groupthink. It prizes pundit-ready quips over substantive debate, and it

> Twitter is making the news dumber. The service is insidery and clubby. It exacerbates groupthink. It prizes pundit-ready quips over substantive debate, and it tends to elevate the silly over the serious — for several sleepless hours this week it was captivated by “covfefe,” which was essentially a brouhaha over a typo. This paragraph captures the essence of it perfectly. The medium basically encourages superficial thinking, or lack of thinking altogether. It's appropriate for rumors and informal shout-outs and chats, but not much more than that.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
fgandiya 9y ago
Yeah, I'm starting to notice this too. I wish the article expanded on this assessment.
TheRealDunkirk 9y ago
It "encourages" superficiality because it precludes "substantive debate" by reason of its artificial character limit. I'm surprised. I managed to make that point in 120 characters. I've had several accounts, over the years, trying to get into it. I can't stand that you can't really put anything substantive in 140 characters, and I hate split tweets, to provide context, just like this, even more.
- cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
  There's tons of superficial and annoying posts on Medium and Facebook posts, as well as people sharing screenshots of their iPhone notes app on Twitter. Most of their authors posted them because they want attention. It's not about the character limit. It's more about how humans want attention and there's an infrastructure to support that desire.
  - saurik 9y ago
    But there are also tons of reasoned and interesting posts on those mediums... the closest that exist on Twitter is the occasionally burst of tweets that you probably didn't even read on Twitter but saw on one of those Twitter conversation archiving websites, as the burst of tweets is totally untraceable :/. Twitter doesn't just "encourage" superficial content with its character limit: it actively enforces superficial content if you want to participate. I have half a million followers on Twitter and I essentially don't ever post anything there as it is next to impossible to say anything of value in 140 characters :/. Everyone I know in my field with Twitter accounts and a ton of followers essentially just use it to post snide bullshit and start arguments, or try and fail to be informative and spend the next week trying and failing to correct some misconception people got due to lack of context. The closest it comes to ever working is in the small community of people who seriously take to reddit to discuss what someone said on Twitter, which is the dumbest thing I could imagine... and it isn't even like Twitter is some amazingly successful company that can say "you are wrong, this works great": most of the talk about them is that they will fail or be acquired at a much lower valuation than they had many years ago.
    - ikeyany 9y ago
      Twitter is an endless bag of potato chips for the mind. However, it's within our nature to seek the path of least resistance, and munch on snack food to keep busy.
voidhorse 9y ago
Yup. The 140 character limit is twitter's worst feature. It's difficult to have any substantial discussion or nuanced debate in a stream of 140 characters or less. Brevity is indeed beautiful, but usually only after your quip has been long considered and pared down from a much longer form of expression. The brilliant aphorists of the world didn't just crap out their sentences of brilliance--they toiled on them (Nietzsche has quite a few good maxims on this subject). Services like twitter make it easy to react and to throw your thoughts out there without engaging in any reflection first. Then it's easy to respond immediately with some follow up nonsense once someone disagrees with you. It shows you how the medium really does impact the message to a huge extent. Imagine how different it must have been composing letters in, say, the 1700's as opposed to writing tweets. By the nature of the medium itself you were almost inevitably likely to ruminate on your subject and think about it more deeply in the time between your letter's arrival to its destination and the subsequent appearance of a response. Nowadays you have feedback in seconds, and most of the time it reflects the minuscule amount of time and consideration behind it. That's not to say twitter is all bad--the format has its benefits too--it just certainly has affected the way and the amount of time people devote to thinking and questioning themselves. In general I think having the ability to consider things slowly and to take one's time may only grow all the more important in the future.
- mindcrime 9y ago
  It shows you how the medium really does impact the message to a huge extent. Remember what Marshall McLuhan said so long ago: "The medium is the message" (emphasis added)
notadoc 9y ago
Sounds like all social media to me.
tkahnoski 9y ago
I've always viewed 24 hour news channels in the same vein. Twitter just puts a layer of social validation on top of it. Social media is driving traditional channels to be worse so that those channels can be more relevant on social media. Fundamentally there's just TOO much information for anyone person to process. Social media democratized the information spread where as before the news bore the brunt of that work. Now everyone has more access to information but at the cost of spending all your time scrolling through it. There's too much to scroll... so we've relegated ourselves to soundbyte headlines. The worst thing about this is we are programmed for group-think but rational behavior requires us to be more self-aware. There's a number of pop-sci books around this one I've personally read is https://www.amazon.com/Wiser-Getting-Beyond-Groupthink-Smarter/dp/1422122999 https://www.amazon.com/Wiser-Getting-Beyond-Groupthink-Smart... in which an important point is made that we need to seek novel information instead of shared information to make better decisions. Social Media as good as it is for discovering new information it has very much become a signal to noise problem.
teaneedz 9y ago
Actually I've found Twitter to be the best news aggregator and breaking news platform of all. 140 char tweets make it easy to compare tweets with other sources very quickly. The algorithmic TLs though contribute more to fake news as well as users who haven't quite learned how to curate their own feeds. What's happened to critical thinking skills? Oh well, Twitter works well for me.
- Florin_Andrei 9y ago
  Well, yeah. You can use it as the next RSS. That - it does well.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

fgandiya 9y ago

Yeah, I'm starting to notice this too. I wish the article expanded on this assessment.

TheRealDunkirk 9y ago

It "encourages" superficiality because it precludes "substantive debate" by reason of its artificial character limit. I'm surprised. I managed to make that point in 120 characters. I've had several accounts, over the years, trying to get into it. I can't stand that you can't really put anything substantive in 140 characters, and I hate split tweets, to provide context, just like this, even more.

cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
There's tons of superficial and annoying posts on Medium and Facebook posts, as well as people sharing screenshots of their iPhone notes app on Twitter. Most of their authors posted them because they want attention. It's not about the character limit. It's more about how humans want attention and there's an infrastructure to support that desire.
- saurik 9y ago
  But there are also tons of reasoned and interesting posts on those mediums... the closest that exist on Twitter is the occasionally burst of tweets that you probably didn't even read on Twitter but saw on one of those Twitter conversation archiving websites, as the burst of tweets is totally untraceable :/. Twitter doesn't just "encourage" superficial content with its character limit: it actively enforces superficial content if you want to participate. I have half a million followers on Twitter and I essentially don't ever post anything there as it is next to impossible to say anything of value in 140 characters :/. Everyone I know in my field with Twitter accounts and a ton of followers essentially just use it to post snide bullshit and start arguments, or try and fail to be informative and spend the next week trying and failing to correct some misconception people got due to lack of context. The closest it comes to ever working is in the small community of people who seriously take to reddit to discuss what someone said on Twitter, which is the dumbest thing I could imagine... and it isn't even like Twitter is some amazingly successful company that can say "you are wrong, this works great": most of the talk about them is that they will fail or be acquired at a much lower valuation than they had many years ago.
  - ikeyany 9y ago
    Twitter is an endless bag of potato chips for the mind. However, it's within our nature to seek the path of least resistance, and munch on snack food to keep busy.

voidhorse 9y ago

Yup. The 140 character limit is twitter's worst feature. It's difficult to have any substantial discussion or nuanced debate in a stream of 140 characters or less. Brevity is indeed beautiful, but usually only after your quip has been long considered and pared down from a much longer form of expression. The brilliant aphorists of the world didn't just crap out their sentences of brilliance--they toiled on them (Nietzsche has quite a few good maxims on this subject). Services like twitter make it easy to react and to throw your thoughts out there without engaging in any reflection first. Then it's easy to respond immediately with some follow up nonsense once someone disagrees with you. It shows you how the medium really does impact the message to a huge extent. Imagine how different it must have been composing letters in, say, the 1700's as opposed to writing tweets. By the nature of the medium itself you were almost inevitably likely to ruminate on your subject and think about it more deeply in the time between your letter's arrival to its destination and the subsequent appearance of a response. Nowadays you have feedback in seconds, and most of the time it reflects the minuscule amount of time and consideration behind it. That's not to say twitter is all bad--the format has its benefits too--it just certainly has affected the way and the amount of time people devote to thinking and questioning themselves. In general I think having the ability to consider things slowly and to take one's time may only grow all the more important in the future.

mindcrime 9y ago
It shows you how the medium really does impact the message to a huge extent. Remember what Marshall McLuhan said so long ago: "The medium is the message" (emphasis added)

notadoc 9y ago

Sounds like all social media to me.

tkahnoski 9y ago

I've always viewed 24 hour news channels in the same vein. Twitter just puts a layer of social validation on top of it. Social media is driving traditional channels to be worse so that those channels can be more relevant on social media. Fundamentally there's just TOO much information for anyone person to process. Social media democratized the information spread where as before the news bore the brunt of that work. Now everyone has more access to information but at the cost of spending all your time scrolling through it. There's too much to scroll... so we've relegated ourselves to soundbyte headlines. The worst thing about this is we are programmed for group-think but rational behavior requires us to be more self-aware. There's a number of pop-sci books around this one I've personally read is https://www.amazon.com/Wiser-Getting-Beyond-Groupthink-Smarter/dp/1422122999 https://www.amazon.com/Wiser-Getting-Beyond-Groupthink-Smart... in which an important point is made that we need to seek novel information instead of shared information to make better decisions. Social Media as good as it is for discovering new information it has very much become a signal to noise problem.

teaneedz 9y ago

Actually I've found Twitter to be the best news aggregator and breaking news platform of all. 140 char tweets make it easy to compare tweets with other sources very quickly. The algorithmic TLs though contribute more to fake news as well as users who haven't quite learned how to curate their own feeds. What's happened to critical thinking skills? Oh well, Twitter works well for me.

Florin_Andrei 9y ago
Well, yeah. You can use it as the next RSS. That - it does well.