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Who's the twit?

April 23

Meanjin is on Twitter. This does not mean, however, that Meanjin is a twit. Why is it that Twitter strikes some people as the anti-christ? Maureen Dowd's editorial in yesterday's New York Times is a case in point. There seems to be a great capacity in some individuals to leap from not understanding something to assuming it is stupid. Certainly Dowd fails in her attempt to make Twitter's founders, Biz Stone and Evan Williams sound idiotic.

My own experience is that those with the greatest antipathy towards it haven't tried it and that while there is boring stuff up there there are also flashes of brilliance. It has an ambient quality that I find creative and exciting - and yes, I confess, sometimes distracting. It's not the answer to world poverty, or a cure for Malaria, but then it's never pretended to be. Thank you to the Guardian's Geoff Manaugh for writing this defense of the form (and to Virginia for providing the links). 'Twitter is very obviously not the answer to everything, and it never should have been portrayed that way; but it also very obviously is not the death of humanism. Twitter is just another option for people to use when they want to take notes – and it's no more exciting than that, either, to be frank. It's a ball-point pen.'

Update: If you find it too hard to take Twitter seriously, go to McSweeney's to have a good laugh at it.


 

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