Editorial: With 100,000,000 other tweeters, choose your content wisely
September 13, 2011
Twitter officially has 100 million
active users.
Keep in mind that those hundred
million users didn’t even have the option of tweeting their
thoughts and activities before March 2006. So in the past
five-and-a-half years, the number of people consuming technology,
adapting it to their needs and exchanging ideas has exploded.
With that increase comes great
benefits. After Johannes Gutenberg invented metal movable type for
the printing press in the 1450s, books became more easily printed
than copied by hand. Books and pamphlets proliferated. A few
centuries later, Britain and her American colonies became famous
for their hesitancy to censor printed material.
Then, with our independence and
Constitution, we enshrined a free press and the dissemination of
information as part of our political institutions. From the
beginning, newspapers were used to project ideas about politics
into the public world. Nearly every newspaper published “The
Federalist Papers,” that legendary effort to convince people to
adopt the Constitution.
As a party system developed between
Federalists and Democratic-Republicans developed, leading figures
in each party chartered newspapers to provide vehicles for their
ideas. “The Aurora,” for instance, vigorously attacked the Adams
administration, and the “Gazette of the United States” supported
the Federalists.
We still have newspapers. And while
broadcast television and radio has been required in the past by the
“Fairness Doctrine” to give voice to multiple viewpoints, cable and
subscription channels and stations have proliferated. Fox News can
support Republicans all it wants; MSNBC can support Democrats all
it wants. If Glenn Beck wants to make his own channel people can
subscribe to, he can, and he can put whatever content on it he
wants.
And now you can do the same. With
Twitter, Facebook, and blogging sites such as WordPress, Tumblr and
Blogger, you can too.
Whatever idea you have, you can
proclaim it. If enough people catch on, it may change your world.
The Iranians found that out, in 2009. After protests surrounding
their disputed presidential election, they were able to coordinate
protests and information about police repression using Twitter. One
of the main ways we heard about those activities, if we did at all,
was through tweets.
With that ability to communicate so
easily comes a responsibility to communicate well — and about
things that actually matter. We don’t care that you’re pulling into
the grocery store parking lot, or that you’ve moved on to paying
for your groceries. What would be good to know, though, is where
the next community concert by a local band is going to be. Or maybe
you should tell us where a political candidate’s rally will be, or
what he or she will say at it.
The power to communicate offers both
the power to give thoughtful, useful information and the power to
give nonsensical drivel no one cares about. Choose wisely.