Twits on Parade
FERGUSON, ANDREW
Twits on Parade Twittering is the newest of the new media. And the worst. BY ANDREW FERGUSON Maybe you’ve noticed: These political blogs can be so gabby. Yap yap yap. You go to some...
...That’s what I hear, anyway...
...Everybody has political opinions—you may have noticed this, too—and it’s now become an article of faith that everyone’s political opinions are of equal value and equally worthy of attention, at least so long as they’re similar to yours...
...A liberal blogger named Ezra Klein, of the American Prospect magazine, got caught Twittering as he watched the late Tim Russert on TV...
...The deadpan, affectless humor of the millennial generation was also in evidence...
...My hours with Twitter demonstrated yet again that baby boomer journalists and their younger colleagues can effortlessly summon references from what must be, for them, the entire spectrum of Western culture: from Lost in Space to the Dave Matthews Band, from the New Frontier to Get Smart, you name it...
...Even a revolutionary technology like Twitter can’t change that...
...Blunt, maybe...
...By one reliable count, Obama supporters on Twitter outnumber McCain supporters nine to one, and the imbalance was refl ected in the comments scrolling down my screen...
...Also, Obama knows how to walk...
...In the real world you can either have me take your political opinions seriously, or you can call yourself “dogmeat69...
...Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Time magazine’s twinkly Twitterer tweeted, with nearly 70 characters to spare: “The ‘telegraph,’ of course, is the form of telecommunications that McCain is most familiar with” Maybe that’s so...
...You type your microblog item on either the keypad of your cell phone or the keyboard of your computer...
...Twitter is based on the tiny...
...before opening up their can of snark: “There appears to be a correlation between being an undecided voter and wearing a goatee...
...By early afternoon on the day of the debate, my page was a-Twitter with tweets from all over...
...The tweets from the staff of Slate made the obligatory Seinfeld allusion (“When did McCain become such a close talker...
...This is a blog post, not Middlemarch, is what you want to say...
...McCain is the Kanye of politicians and Obama is Daft Punk...
...A large number of Twitterers seemed to be watching television and were content merely to describe what they saw, even the commercials before the debate...
...The use of screen names shows one way in which the real world differs from the Internet...
...Every four or fi ve minutes she’d chime in with a comment that was as inoffensive as it was pointless: “will the economy get worse...
...to describe the debate...
...It’s an ingenious way of keeping in touch, particularly for people who need to expose as much of their lives to public scrutiny as possible...
...When written up and broadcast as a tweet, each insignifi cant brain burp, your mildest reaction to events, every minor piece of news, takes on a kind of importance that it wouldn’t have otherwise...
...And as in chat rooms and blogs, the names are either too cute, revolting, or inadvertently self-demeaning...
...I got to like an earnest woman named Kate Phillips from the New York Times, who, considering she works for the Times, was remarkably level-headed...
...But then Klein’s post was published beyond his intended audience of fellow twits...
...f— tim russert,” Klein opined to his Twitter page, without the demure dash...
...Some of my fellow twits restricted themselves to summarizing, every 30 seconds or so, the previous 30 seconds of televised debate...
...Is it really worth the trouble of posting this information on your regular blog...
...McCain’s now in town hall mode— where he’s been a natural—as he talks about his tax plans,” Kate reported...
...And lots of bloggers use it, too, of course—though some of them have become squeamish about Twitter after an incident earlier this year...
...A blogger—embarrassed...
...Many twits had announced they would be “Twittering the debate,” writing up their reactions as they happened, in bursts of 140 characters or fewer, and I figured reading these couldn’t be any less painful, or more boring, than watching the debate on television, slumped in my Barcalounger and shouting at the TV screen like Ezra Klein...
...With only 140 characters, there’s no room for personal pronouns...
...But on the Internet anything goes...
...I’m confi dent about the American economy,” I heard McCain say from the television in the other room...
...The Twitter service is only two years old, but it didn’t take long for people to fi gure out its political uses...
...Oh, he’s swinging now, hits the ball with the bat, there he goes, better slide …” The New Yorker’s pop music critic was Twittering too...
...You go to some website—democretin.com, republicreep.net, whatever—and there will be a new post for you to read, and the blogger goes on for one, two, sometimes three paragraphs, and each paragraph is a huge heap of sentences, two sentences long or even more, and you just want them to get to the point...
...Another complained about the number of guests on a panel on CNN...
...That’s why God invented Twitter —God or whoever...
...Communication on Twitter happens in real time, instantaneously, without that an noying lag time between the moment when the blogger thinks of something to write and the moment when the reader reads it...
...Almost all complained that the “town hall” format wasn’t really a town hall...
...tweeted someone calling himself Shaddock...
...the candidates need to be careful not to cause more market and fear...
...It was a bit like watching a baseball game with a dotty uncle...
...Micro” is the key to Twitter blogging...
...On Twitter, there are fewer words to sling, but some of the journalists were chattier than others...
...The TV reportage continued even after the debate began...
...My dad’s bald spot shines...
...Sasha wasn’t the only one to enrich his tweets with cultural allusions...
...But mostly I enjoyed reading the wordslingers of the press corps...
...The item is called a “tweet,” in keeping with the Romper Room vernacular of the Internet...
...A bold and original suggestion from McCain...
...Those tweets show up on your Twitter page too...
...And instantly the tweet came from NPR: “McCain: confi dent about American economy...
...Sarcasm was big, as it generally is with people who are too mad to be funny...
...I signed up for Twitter out of a clinical interest...
...Many of them were personally unfamiliar to me and known only by their Twitter onscreen aliases...
...The fulfi llment of a dream...
...The same goes for every event in your life...
...At the same time, you get to read the tweets of all the twits whose messages you have signed up to read...
...TheFix from the Washington Post offered stage criticism—“McCain is doing a weird stand/sit on his stool when Obama is answering questions...
...I decided to experience last week’s presidential debate by reading the tweets that came across my Twitter page...
...Looks odd”—and was particularly fond of quoting Bruce Springsteen lyrics...
...Twitter has become a roiling stream of political commentary, unimaginably quick and . . . well, pithy isn’t the right word...
...Everyone sophisticated enough to tweet knows that McCain is really, really old and out-of-it...
...sneered SARDO...
...Is it possible that there are people so disadvantaged that they don’t have access to a television or radio to watch or listen to a presidential debate but they do carry a BlackBerry to receive Twitter messages about the debate they can’t watch or listen to...
...At the end of the debate, no fewer than four of the reporters chose the same insta-clich...
...Ooooh, eliminating bureaucracy...
...BY ANDREW FERGUSON Maybe you’ve noticed: These political blogs can be so gabby...
...Obama wants to respond...
...I chose to use my given name as my screen name, to throw people off...
...she wondered...
...f— him with a spiky acid-tipped d...
...Twitter is a technology of unprecedented power...
...More important, each post on Twitter can be no longer than 140 characters...
...suddenly, thanks to the power of Twitter, it seems to be more consequential than it would ever have been thought to be in any earlier age in human history...
...The number of such people is very large, as you may have noticed...
...Tweeting journalists experience the same mind-meld that makes their non-tweeting colleagues so uninteresting and predictable...
...Uncomplicated always...
...Twitter.com and create an account...
...And when McCain made a clumsy reference to the telegraph, the mirth was widely shared...
...I arranged to have as many twits sending their tweets to my page as I could think of...
...Let’s say you’re an aspiring twit...
...How come McCain’s bald spot doesn’t shine...
...The randomness of Twitter takes some getting used to...
...As in chat rooms and blogs, people in the Twitter universe assign themselves screen names...
...Feel very secondclass citizen,” he told his Twitter audience...
...The implication of this technological echo chamber puzzled me...
...You go to www...
...Try writing Middlemarch in 140 characters...
...That small business jack was lame,” wrote an outraged Sasha Frere-Jones, after one exchange about the economy...
...You now have access to the 2.5 million people who also have Twitter accounts and who, in turn, now have access to yours...
...Who’s the audience...
...Another Post reporter who calls himself “TheFix” recommended a restaurant he and wife had eaten in the night before...
...I think you can work on all three at once, Tom,” McCain told the moderator Tom Brokaw...
...could mccain be an evil little hobbit...
...Here’s how it happens...
...Sometimes blogs are just too cumbersome...
...your curiosity about that awesome tattoo on the cute counterguy who took your order—all can now pass through your consciousness and be placed on public display nearly simultaneously...
...NPR was on the case: “McCain: I think you can work on all three at once, Tom...
...Tweets are extremely short but seldom pithy...
...You can’t do both...
...A third commented on the crawl MSNBC runs at the bottom of the screen...
...It had not, they announced, been a “game changer...
...Which actually sort of makes sense” The unanimity was more than a matter of style...
...It will also appear on the Twitter page of everyone who’s signed up to have your tweets appear on their Twitter page...
...CNET News, a respectable source of news about the Internet, if you can imagine such a thing, says this: If the 2004 elections hailed the debut of bloggers and the 2006 mid-term elections were when YouTube popped onto the scene, it’s looking like 2008 will be the election cycle where Twitter sped to the forefront of the political Web...
...That delicious falafel you just ate...
...There can be hundreds of these if you want, scrolling across your computer or cell phone screen as your messages are endlessly updated, a lava fl ow of one-sentence messages...
...And then she offered a little of that analysis that the Times is famous for: “their differences on health care may be the singlemost voter touchstone, aside from mortgages...
...Maybe . . . but maybe not...
...Twitter is for people who fi nd the pace of blogs too sleepy, the content too wordy, the whole blog thing way, way too 2005...
...It’s an Internet service and a new form of communication that’s about to transform political commentary in much the way blogs have, just as decisively, just as permanently...
...With Twitter, you can just tap your bladder’s condition into your cell phone—“got to hit the head”—and everyone you know, and many whom you don’t know, can read about it instantly...
...On traditional blogs this can often take as much as a minute—an eternity...
...Suzannekart pretended to wonder...
...What the heck—he was just a blogger tweeting away in his pjs on a drowsy Sunday morning...
...A number of political reporters and commentators have begun using Twitter, including some for Time magazine, the Internet magazine Slate, National Public Radio, the Washington Post, and the New York Times...
...Oliver Stone is advertising on FoxNews,” announced one (using only 38 characters...
...The tweet appears instantly on your Twitter page...
...Suppose you need to go to the bathroom...
...A reporter for the Washington Post who was covering Barack Obama complained of being trapped in his hotel by Obama’s security arrangements...
...He was forced to apologize in embarrassment...
...If it is, I hope the old fellow knows how lucky he’s been...
...This gives you your own Twitter homepage...
...I’m not complaining, really I’m not, because the brief factual summaries I was receiving were far superior to the other tweets that were spilling into my laptop...
...Why bother...
...They didn’t take all those “American Studies” classes for nothing...
...the chunk of chick pea that got caught in your teeth...
...The microblogging site has proven to be a must-use tool for opinionated news junkies and aspiring pundits...
...It’s like you’re being turned inside out...
Vol. 14 • October 2008 • No. 6
