7 ms·

Tech design choices can have profound social impact. This is just a personal theory, but I suspect Twitter's choices have done huge damage to Western Civilizat

by feral 9y ago

Tech design choices can have profound social impact. This is just a personal theory, but I suspect Twitter's choices have done huge damage to Western Civilization, by forcing, as a medium, a very short 'soundbite' structure onto debate. (Even more so than the media which gave us the term 'soundbite' ever did!) So that sounds like a very overblown assertion, right? But think about Trump. Twitter is his platform, and arguably he is the sort of President a platform like Twitter most directly enables. He gets direct unchallenged access to a mass medium, a mass medium which makes it particularly hard to counteract false claims or have reasoned debate. For exactly the issues Antirez is raising. I don't have evidence to support my theory, all I can say is I don't think I want Twitter to succeed.

chrisseaton 9y ago
I'm not sure if you're trying to make a point with a misspelling, but the term the media gave us was 'soundbite'.
- feral 9y ago
  Fixed, thanks. Someone should comment about how autocorrect is destroying our civilization :) (I love autocorrect which I think enables us to concentrate more on meaning of communication than mechanics - occasional errors aside!)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
SonOfLilit 9y ago
Is it Twitter's choices, or society's choice to use Twitter? i.e. do you think Twitter would have reached the status of presidential communication platform had it not made this choice?
- feral 9y ago
  It's a fair question. I don't know. But the causal ordering here shouldn't change how we feel about Twitter. As an analogy, it's a bit like if you have a candidate running on a racist platform in an election. Maybe you can validly ask whether they are causing racism or whether the racism is causing them; but either way you shouldn't vote for them.
- nindalf 9y ago
  Twitter did what was good for Twitter - becoming fun, addictive and compelling to use. People made a choice to use that compelling product. These choices worked out well for Twitter, but according to the GP, not well for the users, who unknowingly hurt their society.
  - hoorayimhelping 9y ago
    Thank you for the concise summary of GP's post. I think tthe post you're responding to is trying to reframe the point with a question though: are you sure it's actually bad for society? maybe this is how our society communicates and twitter was just an expression of that. In other worse, it's less that twitter influenced society, and more that society was waiting for the medium to communicate the way it wants.
    - pdimitar 9y ago
      You might just be 100% correct. I would still prefer the de facto dominating social platforms to enable more meaningful discussions and not promote the sensationalist statements format of "communication" that Twitter offers. Society definitely responds to media influence. Sadly this is exploited in the wrong direction and rarely if ever for the society's benefit (mostly education).
  - orbitur 9y ago
    > These choices worked out well for Twitter You could say that, since it appears Twitter is now the primary platform for broadcasting outside of film/tv. But is Twitter even making money yet? How sad and dumb would it be that Twitter had to shut down in a couple years?
- astrobe_ 9y ago
  It's just one popular platform at the moment. If it was IRC, Trump would have his IRC channel. Had Myspace survived long enough (in terms of popularity, that is), he would have a Myspace page. Politics and companies go where the most people are and use that platform to the best of their own interests. If they don't have the knack for long analytical articles or short witty comments, they just hire people who do.
  - tluyben2 9y ago
    > If it was IRC I think that is something to doubt; IRC was made for discussion and even long winded discussion. That would not work for Trump as far as I can see. The format of Twitter makes discussion hard / impossible. To really create proper reasoning, you need to link a blogpost and most people simply will not click on it.
- bsenftner 9y ago
  There is a fallacy that society had a choice. News organizations are struggling for any means to hold readership interest, and twitter's format forces nuanced, complex issues to be shorthanded and misunderstood to readership outrage revenue increasing levels. Just follow the money.
  - SonOfLilit 9y ago
    Society doesn't choose the same way one rational might choose, but it definitely chooses. It chose facebook over myspace over not having a social network, for instance.
dudul 9y ago
No needs to play the Trump card IMO. The minute politicians started using Twitter to describe their policy you could tell it was over. And it happened way before Trump.
kakarot 9y ago
Consider an alternate perspective: There were other platforms that opted for a longer format. Yet Twitter became popular. Perhaps the reality is that, had Twitter opted for a longer format, another platform would have taken its place. Twitter may not be the cause of societal aversion to meaningful, dense discourse, but a symptom.
- tnone 9y ago
  If Twitter had been preceded by a platform like it, but with longer character length, do you think people would switch to Twitter? I don't think so. We actually have a case to compare to due to the curiosity of language: Japanese twitter. They can fit much longer ideas in 140 characters. It is a much saner place, and there is no shorter service leeching users. It's far more likely that what keeps Twitter going is the social network of the existing user base and the vendor lock in of its APIs.
- awinder 9y ago
  I think this is a much stronger historical argument. Twitter came out in 2006, the soundbite culture was a big topic definitely before 2006 (Jon Stewart, for one, had been campaigning against it for years by that point)
supremesaboteur 9y ago
> But think about Trump. Twitter is his platform, and arguably he is the sort of President a platform like Twitter most directly enables. He gets direct unchallenged access to a mass medium This is actually not true. Many of Trump's claims are challenged on Twitter and outside of Twitter. Maybe you don't like that he can directly talk to the people rather than twist his words to suit your narrative before heading it over to the masses
- sddfd 9y ago
  They are challenged, true. But does this impact his tweets? More importantly, I do not think Twitter is a good platform to present a statement /together/ with its challenges.
- subpixel 9y ago
  Just yesterday I looked at Twitter to read up about a back and forth between two developers I respect. I was reminded that Twitter makes it well-nigh impossible to follow multiple sides of a conversation. (Of course, calling what happens on Twitter a conversation is a stretch to begin with.) Much of the time, when a tweet says that it's 'in reply to' someone else, the specific tweet it was meant as a reply to is not displayed to third parties. If you extend this experience to the Trump scenario, it's a total fantasy to think his followers on Twitter are being exposed to rebuttals of his statements. You see counter-opinions if you follow the person who expresses them. It's the inverse of discourse, and I agree it's cancerous to civil society.
  - ygaf 9y ago
    I never got started with twitter, because it just didn't make sense, without a bit of practice using it at least. Thanks for confirming it is a general mess.
- cvsh 9y ago
  Yeah it's less because of places where news spreads among the savvy like Twitter (and Reddit, and niche communities like HN) and increasingly more about the "last mile" of news -- the increasingly fragmented and ethically unconstrained ecosystem where people actually hear news from. Facebook is, in my mind, much more culpable, being at the point of the spear for the radicalization of last mile news delivery.
dredmorbius 9y ago
You might find Elizabeth Eisenstein's work of interest: The Printing Press as an Agent of Change I think we might see "Twitter as an Agent of Change" from a future historian. If we have future historians. Oh, here it is, from 2013: https://earlyamericanists.com/2013/04/29/twitter-as-an-agent-of-change/ https://earlyamericanists.com/2013/04/29/twitter-as-an-agent... Eisenstein: Book 1979: http://www.worldcat.org/title/printing-press-as-an-agent-of-change-communications-and-cultural-transformations-in-early-modern-europe-volumes-i-and-ii/oclc/856017228 http://www.worldcat.org/title/printing-press-as-an-agent-of-... Preliminary article, 1968: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1877720 http://www.jstor.org/stable/1877720 Bio: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Eisenstein https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Eisenstein Obit: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/24/books/elizabeth-eisenstein-historian-of-movable-type-dies-at-92.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/24/books/elizabeth-eisenstei...
- wyclif 9y ago
  Eisenstein's work is getting more attention this year, because it's the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. Which, of course, couldn't have happened without the printing press and mass publication. It's a great book worth reading if you're into the geekier aspects of print history.
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    Quite honestly, I just happened to stumble across it last November. It strikes me as highly appropriate.
pjc50 9y ago
> very short 'soundbite' structure onto debate But as you say the traditional media do this too - and have been just as instrumental in the rise of Trump. The "false equivalence" media structure, and the direct promotion of right-wing editorial through Murdoch news properties, are also extremely important.
- sitkack 9y ago
  Propaganda is asymmetric, it takes more energy to communicate and rebut with Truth than it does to fabricate lies. Truth requires precision, clarity and subtlety; lies are a dead-blow hammer.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    Yes. But this isn't new and certainly isn't specific to Twitter.
    - sitkack 9y ago
      The channel capacity is full of false. So responding takes more than one tweet of true. The medium of twitter makes it hard to rebut anything but the most simple statements.
    - chiefalchemist 9y ago
      Agreed. Twitter is only a clearer mirror of who we really are.
      - bsenftner 9y ago
        No, "conversations" on twitter are a reflection of the platform's limited ability to convey the nuance and subtle nature of truth in contexts that matter.
- chiefalchemist 9y ago
  Thank you for saying "traditional media" and not using the word journalists. Wanna bring my blood to a quick boil? Have a news program that pulls content from Twitter. And usually completely unvetted. Who needs legit sources? It this regard, Twitter is an idea shit show. You can find just about anything said about anything there. So to pull more or less randomly is, to me, unimaginable and too often inappropriate and upsetting.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jasonthevillain 9y ago
I agree. Other people are pointing out that soundbites existed before Twitter, but it opened up the ranks of the public babblerati to everyone, and promoted it as a platform for public discussion. I dropped Twitter years ago, subscribed to a collection of newsletters to fill the gap in technical discussion, and honestly, I think I'm actually more informed for it.
lyra_comms 9y ago
There is plenty of research showing that the patterns and atmosphere a platform promotes can have huge effects on conversation and discourse. This is what we're doing with Lyra (www.hellolyra.com): using a respect for language and cognitive load to create an open, sensible conversation platform.
- DelightOne 9y ago
  As far as I understand you can chat to exchange news or chat to learn. Twitter is to exchange news. What is yours for and is it any good at that?
  - lyra_comms 9y ago
    Lyra isn't designed with any particular context in mind. We aim to allow the full expressive power of language, not imposing any ethos, topic or atmosphere. Lyra is a communication tool, not an opinionated social space.
    - lyra_comms 9y ago
      You don't converse just to exchange news or learn. People converse to tell stories, to laugh, to discuss, to exchange points of view, to convince, to refute, to pass time, to plan, to reminisce... Lyra is like a blank sheet of paper. It doesn't tell you what to talk about. That's up to you.
chiefalchemist 9y ago
I agree. But I don't think it's Twitter's fault per se. It's just a tool. Sure it can influence, have an effect, but I'm not so sure it's powerful enough to create something from nothing. Especially given the fact it has a limit heavy user base, a fair number of casual and then a whole lotta non users. My point is, I think the tendency for sound-bite intelligence (hold the applause, you heard it here first. Lol) was already there. I mean, Orwell gets at it in directly in 1984. Also, given the number of non Twitter users, I think this also helps explain why the whole culture shifted. Sure, there are Twitter users with offline influence but that many? I think not. In any case, to blame Twitter is meta. It's a symptom of the problem itself. That is, less thinking and more simplification is the sign of the times.
- bsenftner 9y ago
  Twitter is a more powerful a tool than most realize; twitter enables anyone with a public following to direct that public following as a shit-show army destroying any online presence of their opposition. Powerful twitter users direct their followers like an army, and quite effectively. One is POTUS now.
awkwarddaturtle 9y ago
It's funny how similar the people on the left are to the people on the right. 9 years ago when Obama was elected with deft use of social media, the right was saying "myspace/youtube/social media" has damaged western civilization. Now the left is blaming social media for the election of trump and damaging western civilization. > But think about Trump. Twitter is his platform, and arguably he is the sort of President a platform like Twitter most directly enables. Were you complaining about twitter when obama used it well to push his agenda? > He gets direct unchallenged access to a mass medium, a mass medium which makes it particularly hard to counteract false claims or have reasoned debate. You mean people have direct access to what the leader thinks? Is that so terrible? Do you really prefer a system when a handful of like-minded editors in media companies frame everything to their agenda? > I don't have evidence to support my theory, all I can say is I don't think I want Twitter to succeed. Because free speech is such a horrific thing when you don't get your way?

by feral 9y ago

chrisseaton 9y ago

I'm not sure if you're trying to make a point with a misspelling, but the term the media gave us was 'soundbite'.

feral 9y ago
Fixed, thanks. Someone should comment about how autocorrect is destroying our civilization :) (I love autocorrect which I think enables us to concentrate more on meaning of communication than mechanics - occasional errors aside!)
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

SonOfLilit 9y ago

Is it Twitter's choices, or society's choice to use Twitter? i.e. do you think Twitter would have reached the status of presidential communication platform had it not made this choice?

feral 9y ago
It's a fair question. I don't know. But the causal ordering here shouldn't change how we feel about Twitter. As an analogy, it's a bit like if you have a candidate running on a racist platform in an election. Maybe you can validly ask whether they are causing racism or whether the racism is causing them; but either way you shouldn't vote for them.
nindalf 9y ago
Twitter did what was good for Twitter - becoming fun, addictive and compelling to use. People made a choice to use that compelling product. These choices worked out well for Twitter, but according to the GP, not well for the users, who unknowingly hurt their society.
- hoorayimhelping 9y ago
  Thank you for the concise summary of GP's post. I think tthe post you're responding to is trying to reframe the point with a question though: are you sure it's actually bad for society? maybe this is how our society communicates and twitter was just an expression of that. In other worse, it's less that twitter influenced society, and more that society was waiting for the medium to communicate the way it wants.
  - pdimitar 9y ago
    You might just be 100% correct. I would still prefer the de facto dominating social platforms to enable more meaningful discussions and not promote the sensationalist statements format of "communication" that Twitter offers. Society definitely responds to media influence. Sadly this is exploited in the wrong direction and rarely if ever for the society's benefit (mostly education).
- orbitur 9y ago
  > These choices worked out well for Twitter You could say that, since it appears Twitter is now the primary platform for broadcasting outside of film/tv. But is Twitter even making money yet? How sad and dumb would it be that Twitter had to shut down in a couple years?
astrobe_ 9y ago
It's just one popular platform at the moment. If it was IRC, Trump would have his IRC channel. Had Myspace survived long enough (in terms of popularity, that is), he would have a Myspace page. Politics and companies go where the most people are and use that platform to the best of their own interests. If they don't have the knack for long analytical articles or short witty comments, they just hire people who do.
- tluyben2 9y ago
  > If it was IRC I think that is something to doubt; IRC was made for discussion and even long winded discussion. That would not work for Trump as far as I can see. The format of Twitter makes discussion hard / impossible. To really create proper reasoning, you need to link a blogpost and most people simply will not click on it.
bsenftner 9y ago
There is a fallacy that society had a choice. News organizations are struggling for any means to hold readership interest, and twitter's format forces nuanced, complex issues to be shorthanded and misunderstood to readership outrage revenue increasing levels. Just follow the money.
- SonOfLilit 9y ago
  Society doesn't choose the same way one rational might choose, but it definitely chooses. It chose facebook over myspace over not having a social network, for instance.

dudul 9y ago

No needs to play the Trump card IMO. The minute politicians started using Twitter to describe their policy you could tell it was over. And it happened way before Trump.

kakarot 9y ago

Consider an alternate perspective: There were other platforms that opted for a longer format. Yet Twitter became popular. Perhaps the reality is that, had Twitter opted for a longer format, another platform would have taken its place. Twitter may not be the cause of societal aversion to meaningful, dense discourse, but a symptom.

tnone 9y ago
If Twitter had been preceded by a platform like it, but with longer character length, do you think people would switch to Twitter? I don't think so. We actually have a case to compare to due to the curiosity of language: Japanese twitter. They can fit much longer ideas in 140 characters. It is a much saner place, and there is no shorter service leeching users. It's far more likely that what keeps Twitter going is the social network of the existing user base and the vendor lock in of its APIs.
awinder 9y ago
I think this is a much stronger historical argument. Twitter came out in 2006, the soundbite culture was a big topic definitely before 2006 (Jon Stewart, for one, had been campaigning against it for years by that point)

supremesaboteur 9y ago

> But think about Trump. Twitter is his platform, and arguably he is the sort of President a platform like Twitter most directly enables. He gets direct unchallenged access to a mass medium This is actually not true. Many of Trump's claims are challenged on Twitter and outside of Twitter. Maybe you don't like that he can directly talk to the people rather than twist his words to suit your narrative before heading it over to the masses

sddfd 9y ago
They are challenged, true. But does this impact his tweets? More importantly, I do not think Twitter is a good platform to present a statement /together/ with its challenges.
subpixel 9y ago
Just yesterday I looked at Twitter to read up about a back and forth between two developers I respect. I was reminded that Twitter makes it well-nigh impossible to follow multiple sides of a conversation. (Of course, calling what happens on Twitter a conversation is a stretch to begin with.) Much of the time, when a tweet says that it's 'in reply to' someone else, the specific tweet it was meant as a reply to is not displayed to third parties. If you extend this experience to the Trump scenario, it's a total fantasy to think his followers on Twitter are being exposed to rebuttals of his statements. You see counter-opinions if you follow the person who expresses them. It's the inverse of discourse, and I agree it's cancerous to civil society.
- ygaf 9y ago
  I never got started with twitter, because it just didn't make sense, without a bit of practice using it at least. Thanks for confirming it is a general mess.
cvsh 9y ago
Yeah it's less because of places where news spreads among the savvy like Twitter (and Reddit, and niche communities like HN) and increasingly more about the "last mile" of news -- the increasingly fragmented and ethically unconstrained ecosystem where people actually hear news from. Facebook is, in my mind, much more culpable, being at the point of the spear for the radicalization of last mile news delivery.

dredmorbius 9y ago

You might find Elizabeth Eisenstein's work of interest: The Printing Press as an Agent of Change I think we might see "Twitter as an Agent of Change" from a future historian. If we have future historians. Oh, here it is, from 2013: https://earlyamericanists.com/2013/04/29/twitter-as-an-agent-of-change/ https://earlyamericanists.com/2013/04/29/twitter-as-an-agent... Eisenstein: Book 1979: http://www.worldcat.org/title/printing-press-as-an-agent-of-change-communications-and-cultural-transformations-in-early-modern-europe-volumes-i-and-ii/oclc/856017228 http://www.worldcat.org/title/printing-press-as-an-agent-of-... Preliminary article, 1968: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1877720 http://www.jstor.org/stable/1877720 Bio: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Eisenstein https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Eisenstein Obit: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/24/books/elizabeth-eisenstein-historian-of-movable-type-dies-at-92.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/24/books/elizabeth-eisenstei...

wyclif 9y ago
Eisenstein's work is getting more attention this year, because it's the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. Which, of course, couldn't have happened without the printing press and mass publication. It's a great book worth reading if you're into the geekier aspects of print history.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  Quite honestly, I just happened to stumble across it last November. It strikes me as highly appropriate.

pjc50 9y ago

> very short 'soundbite' structure onto debate But as you say the traditional media do this too - and have been just as instrumental in the rise of Trump. The "false equivalence" media structure, and the direct promotion of right-wing editorial through Murdoch news properties, are also extremely important.

sitkack 9y ago
Propaganda is asymmetric, it takes more energy to communicate and rebut with Truth than it does to fabricate lies. Truth requires precision, clarity and subtlety; lies are a dead-blow hammer.
- pjc50 9y ago
  Yes. But this isn't new and certainly isn't specific to Twitter.
  - sitkack 9y ago
    The channel capacity is full of false. So responding takes more than one tweet of true. The medium of twitter makes it hard to rebut anything but the most simple statements.
  - chiefalchemist 9y ago
    Agreed. Twitter is only a clearer mirror of who we really are.
    - bsenftner 9y ago
      No, "conversations" on twitter are a reflection of the platform's limited ability to convey the nuance and subtle nature of truth in contexts that matter.
chiefalchemist 9y ago
Thank you for saying "traditional media" and not using the word journalists. Wanna bring my blood to a quick boil? Have a news program that pulls content from Twitter. And usually completely unvetted. Who needs legit sources? It this regard, Twitter is an idea shit show. You can find just about anything said about anything there. So to pull more or less randomly is, to me, unimaginable and too often inappropriate and upsetting.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

jasonthevillain 9y ago

I agree. Other people are pointing out that soundbites existed before Twitter, but it opened up the ranks of the public babblerati to everyone, and promoted it as a platform for public discussion. I dropped Twitter years ago, subscribed to a collection of newsletters to fill the gap in technical discussion, and honestly, I think I'm actually more informed for it.

lyra_comms 9y ago

There is plenty of research showing that the patterns and atmosphere a platform promotes can have huge effects on conversation and discourse. This is what we're doing with Lyra (www.hellolyra.com): using a respect for language and cognitive load to create an open, sensible conversation platform.

DelightOne 9y ago
As far as I understand you can chat to exchange news or chat to learn. Twitter is to exchange news. What is yours for and is it any good at that?
- lyra_comms 9y ago
  Lyra isn't designed with any particular context in mind. We aim to allow the full expressive power of language, not imposing any ethos, topic or atmosphere. Lyra is a communication tool, not an opinionated social space.
  - lyra_comms 9y ago
    You don't converse just to exchange news or learn. People converse to tell stories, to laugh, to discuss, to exchange points of view, to convince, to refute, to pass time, to plan, to reminisce... Lyra is like a blank sheet of paper. It doesn't tell you what to talk about. That's up to you.

chiefalchemist 9y ago

I agree. But I don't think it's Twitter's fault per se. It's just a tool. Sure it can influence, have an effect, but I'm not so sure it's powerful enough to create something from nothing. Especially given the fact it has a limit heavy user base, a fair number of casual and then a whole lotta non users. My point is, I think the tendency for sound-bite intelligence (hold the applause, you heard it here first. Lol) was already there. I mean, Orwell gets at it in directly in 1984. Also, given the number of non Twitter users, I think this also helps explain why the whole culture shifted. Sure, there are Twitter users with offline influence but that many? I think not. In any case, to blame Twitter is meta. It's a symptom of the problem itself. That is, less thinking and more simplification is the sign of the times.

bsenftner 9y ago
Twitter is a more powerful a tool than most realize; twitter enables anyone with a public following to direct that public following as a shit-show army destroying any online presence of their opposition. Powerful twitter users direct their followers like an army, and quite effectively. One is POTUS now.

awkwarddaturtle 9y ago

It's funny how similar the people on the left are to the people on the right. 9 years ago when Obama was elected with deft use of social media, the right was saying "myspace/youtube/social media" has damaged western civilization. Now the left is blaming social media for the election of trump and damaging western civilization. > But think about Trump. Twitter is his platform, and arguably he is the sort of President a platform like Twitter most directly enables. Were you complaining about twitter when obama used it well to push his agenda? > He gets direct unchallenged access to a mass medium, a mass medium which makes it particularly hard to counteract false claims or have reasoned debate. You mean people have direct access to what the leader thinks? Is that so terrible? Do you really prefer a system when a handful of like-minded editors in media companies frame everything to their agenda? > I don't have evidence to support my theory, all I can say is I don't think I want Twitter to succeed. Because free speech is such a horrific thing when you don't get your way?