In plain view, hidden

[koganbot]

Glenn Greenwald in today's Salon:

John Cole confesses to what he acknowledges is a "Get off my lawn" sentiment in questioning the purpose, value and appeal of Twitter. At the risk of appearing as crotchety as he does, I share that bewilderment. About Twitter messages, John says "they all read like cell phone text messages between 12 year olds," and indeed, the only purpose I can discern is that it provides a format for expressing thoughts that are too inconsequential to merit a stand-alone article or post. For precisely that reason, it is unsurprising that Twitter has become a huge hit among our media stars, for whom triviality is a guiding principle.

Well, that final sentence is gratuitous snark. In any event, I can't speak for Twitter, since I'm not signed up, but Greenwald gives a potential answer to his own question: "it provides a format for expressing thoughts that are too inconsequential to merit a stand-alone article or post." So, being apparently inconsequential, the heat is off. They don't count. So they don't need scrutiny, and therefore they escape censorship by the serious mind (which is not engaged). Hence Twitter can be an area for free play, a field for the forbidden - not a field for the Seriously Recognized Transgression, but for that which is suppressed in virtue of its being beneath notice. Hence Twitter can be a public Unconscious, one that's in plain sight, like pop music before the Beatles. (Not to say that Twitter is like this - as I say, I don't know - but that it has the capacity. But I still don't think I have time for another distraction.)

h/t Tal Rosenberg

Comments

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I think you're right about the ostensible inanity of Twitter providing cover for something more interesting - but then I think how people say things can be more interesting than what they say. And whether it's inane or not, a person's decision to put certain kinds of inanity on Twitter and not others can be mildly diverting. In any case, despite them all posting basically inconsequential stuff, I'm getting a v distinct sense of personality from the celebrities I'm following. Cassie is sweet, naive and enthusiastic. Solange is bratty and entitled. Erykah Badu is somehow simultaneously earth mother and stoned space goddess. Justin Timberlake is confused and good-humoured. Mariah loves her dog, her backing vox and her fans. Jim Jones is ghetto and self-aware. Etc.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Actually, Erykah's tweets over the weekend about her stalker getting arrested outside her house were pretty riveting.

[koganbot]

I wonder how many fictional Twitters there are (like this one from a trade representative for the AMSC, "a trade organization for the promotion of industrial milk solids").

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i have to see i understand why greenwald -- who is a rigorously sourpuss constitutional lawyer -- is exasperated when bigname political journalists and pundits find EVEN MORE ways to ignore the lawbreaking and whatevs of the powerful

[koganbot]

Well, I don't buy this (and I don't buy that it's Greenwald's reasoning or yours, either). It's just another version of "the issue of Britney's not wearing panties is only being raised to distract the population from the administration's inept warmongering in Iraq, etc. etc.," as if you can't walk (consider Iraq) and chew gum (Britney's panties) at the same time. Is PBS.

But it's not Tweets or Lack Of Panties that prevent journalists and pundits from addressing the lawbreaking and whatevs of the powerful. Take away Tweets and Panties Business and people will still be interested/not interested in power and politics about as much as they are now.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

GG is a lawyer, not a journalist -- that's to say he works in and comes from a context where timewasting and distraction are genuinely (and routinely and successfully) used to win cases. So naturally he sees them in this context too; because he's by nature a sourpuss he sees them as the enemy (someone like Alexander Cockburn, coming from a similar place politically in many ways*, is by contrast extremely pro-gossip).

GG's point is NOT that the READER is being distracted; it's that the pundits are being distracted; and not by some sinister higher force (or even by market forces), but by their own class interests. He is specifically arguing about a clearly defined** class of writer and opinion-maker, and what he considered their weirdly distorted attitude to their job and what they ought to be covering, and how.*** The snarkpoint isn't really gratuitous in the context of this extended argument (which he's been pursuing for years): which is that high-status pundits are more concerned about status and gossip and access, than they are about being good journalists...

*both are pal's of chomsky's
**not clearly defined in this post
***I think he has a very starchily idealised view of how journalism should work -- but that's because he's not a journalist, he's (as a said) a sourpuss constitutional lawyer, thus (as I also said) I don't find his view particularly surprising. I would expect someone in his profession, with his stance, to take this kind of line: Cockburn's view is more like mine, but then we're both writers with over-developed sense of mischief.

[koganbot]

Ah, but maybe it's the READERS who are distracting the pundits (by being unaccountably interested in what the pundits write, rather than directing the pundits towards what Greenwald thinks they should write).

Haven't been following Greenwald, but "class interests" seems like just another name for "sinister higher force." "Immediate personal interest" might be more like it, "interest" in more than one sense of the word (e.g., includes curiosity and dreams and ideals). E.g., to say that it is in my class interest to prefer the new Iglesias single to the new Franz Ferdinand single is not a good explanation why I prefer the new Iglesias single to the new Franz Ferdinand, whereas it would be genuinely interesting to explore why "people like me," with all our varied and individual reasons for liking/disliking Iglesias/Franz, tend to more or less like the same things - hence clump together as a class in our tastes and in other ways as well. "Class interests" sounds teleological and mystical - as if the result were prewritten, and we were just pulled along into it. I'd be modeling myself on Duncan Watts and Kuhn, instead, in exploring what propels us, in our immediate situations, with our immediate predilections and dreams and ideals and self "interest" and our actually present colleagues.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

"Class interests" sounds teleological and mystical: haha like "influence", you mean?

Yes by all means project the actual fruitful meaning into what I'm saying, as opposed to some strawman-lame one: I agree that this is a term which has had a lot of lazy in-built prejudice built into it over the years, but it's still a perfectly good term for what you're calling the "genuinely interesting to explore" aspect in regard to the actual words included in the actual phrase...

"Immediate personal interest, with respect to a (professional) group you wish to be seen to be part of and to be admired and powerful within" <-- is there a better two-word redux of this available? It's what GG is getting at.



(i am v.crabby today as you can possibly tell)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

but maybe it's the READERS who are distracting the pundits (by being unaccountably interested in what the pundits write, rather than directing the pundits towards what Greenwald thinks they should write): this has very much been part of the to-and-fro on this topic -- essentially newspaper editors using exactly this claim to justify the direction punditry has gone in (that it's what the readers want), and greenwald citing endless polls insisting that the reading public says very different (not to mention the vanishing readership of old-form newspapers...)

(GG is aware that polls are unreliable on this kind of matter -- people pass on to pollsters opinions that are more worthy and respectable than their behaviour reflects -- but he is of the opinion that the evidence the editors are citing of "what readers want" is if anything even less well-grounded

[koganbot]

That makes sense actually, though declining newspaper revenue can't be credibly used to fortify any position about content (I mean, Ann Coulter claims that it's owing to readers rejecting the liberal media) (and also, it isn't so much that readership has declined [though I'm pretty sure it has significantly, but if you combine Web visits and hard copy perusal, I think I read somewhere recently that there hasn't been that much of a falloff at all, though what I read could have been all wrong] as that advertisers have fled).

[koganbot]

(i am v.crabby today as you can possibly tell)

Don't worry about it. I mean, what would be the point of trolling you if I never wound you up?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

the percentage of the crabbiness not at all caused by you was the part i was apologising for

[petronia.livejournal.com]

While the economy dominates traditional media, bloggers focus on orange juice. (And Obama, granted.)

[koganbot]

"In 1938, near the end of a decade of monumental turmoil, the year's number one newsmaker was not Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Hitler, or Mussolini. It wasn't Pope Pius XI, nor was it Lou Gehrig, Howard Hughes, or Clark Gable. The subject of the most newspaper column inches in 1938 wasn't even a person. It was an undersized, cross-legged racehorse named Seabiscuit."
--Laura Hillenbrand, Seabiscuit, p xi.

(Presumably she means U.S. newspaper column inches.)

[sm-woods.livejournal.com]

That terrible last sentence ("for whom triviality..." etc.) is certainly one of the dumber sentences Greenwald has written of late, to the point where I might suggest (I mean, I can't say for sure, don't read everything the guy writes) that it's a bit out of character for him -- to be so prissy about it all, I mean. He's a pretty hard-hitting writer most of the time but not by any stretch what I would call an ungenerous thinker. But anyway, I think he's just not getting it right regardless -- Twitter is people chattering and thinking aloud in headlines and puns; the format prevents it from being "in-depth" but that's not to say it's necessarily inconsequential. (I also don't think it's beyond scrutiny, at least among politicos. Media outlets like CNN and MSNBC are watching like a hawk -- and feeding into their own reporting -- the pronouncements and back and forths on Twitter between various senators, members of congress, etc. John McCain, for one, seems to be using it specifically to push a talking point forward. Though maybe what you're saying here is not that people aren't reading the stuff but that people aren't really paying attention?)

[sm-woods.livejournal.com]

Anyway, I've got a Twitter account, post to it every couple days or so, and among those I'm following: Lester Bangs and Marshall McLuhan. Some of my best Twitter friends are dead!

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Twitter is totally the web 2.0 elephant in the blind men/elephant story.

Sorry that makes little sense.

[koganbot]

Makes perfect sense. We each see a tiny little bit of the Twitter mammoth and draw our conclusions on the whole thing based on the little bit we notice.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

worst thing about twitter is that stephen fry seems to be at the centre of it - i swear i will defriend anyone who so much as mentions him again

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

yes he is High King of Rong at the moment

[koganbot]

Tom Ewing: The Blind Men And The Twitterphant: A Fable