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

[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).