The world that Twitter never made

https://scholars-stage.org/the-world-that-twitter-never-made/

by jseliger • 4 years ago

50 56 4 years ago

kosasbest• 4 years ago

Twitter was instrumental in the Arab Spring[0]. Many organize and plan protests on there, trying to recreate that initial success. Twitter is a mirror of the real world, albeit a very bad one. People who say 'Twitter is just text' have obviously never watched whole 30-minutes news article videos on Twitter, so it's not 'just text', it's full of rich media.

The Russia-Ukraine war is all over the platform, for better or worse. It annoys me that people are resorting to disaster tourism, popcorn in their hands, whilst watching the world burn. Stop being an armchair activist, and get out there and make a dent whilst you still can. A small retweet of something you think is important means nothing in the grand scheme of things.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_and_the_Arab_Spri...

bryanrasmussen• 4 years ago

Is Twitter today the same Twitter than enabled the Arab Spring though?

pclmulqdq3• 4 years ago

Arguably yes. Twitter was one of the main tools used by the organizers of the BLM Summer of Love in 2020, and the MAGA coup on Jan 6.

sam_lowry_• 4 years ago

The Russia-Ukraine war is all over the platform,

Original content is mostly on Telegram.

saurik• 4 years ago

Your reference does not agree with your assertion ;P.

imbnwa• 4 years ago

"Is debated" is good enough if people take the existence of the link as evidence enough

LAC-Tech5• 4 years ago

The article you quote says 61,000 people died in the Arab Spring. Libyas second civil war just recently concluded and the Syrian civil war is ongoing.

I'm having a lot of difficulty regarding this as a positive.

frankosaurus• 4 years ago

Zeynep Tufekci's book Twitter and Tear Gas talks about this.

In Tunisia circa 2010, Twitter was part of the new tactics used by social movements and enabled their early success. Establishment groups weren't ready for it and in some ways ignorant of the new technology.

She argues that those in power have since evolved their tactics to counteract these innovations so they're no longer as effective.

For example, in countries where mass censorship is not possible, establishments have adopted techniques of information overload and discrediting/questioning everything to reduce the effectiveness of social movements.

throw_m239339• 4 years ago

She argues that those in power have since evolved their tactics to counteract these innovations so they're no longer as effective.

Not only governments have caught up but they successfully cracked down on these protesters using their Twitter user history against them, especially in Turkey during the great political purge after the failed (fake) coup attempt.

seadan835• 4 years ago

This, "we don't have to be right, just loud". Personally I feel like this is the environment that spawned the tea party. I recall McCain saying if Obama was elected then we would certainly see another 9/11 attack. I think this is where the discourse is poisoned. Nobody has to ever say they were wrong anymore #lookSquirrel & retweet

jmyeet• 4 years ago

... never watched whole 30-minutes news article videos on Twitter,

I don't think anyone has watched any 30 minute video on Twitter because I've yet to see a Twitter video go more than about 10 seconds without buffering.

I'm honestly shocked at just how bad Twitter is at serving video. For a company that size and for as important as video is, it's absolutely inexcusable.

fferen• 4 years ago

+1, Full screen video works about 10% of the time on my phone.

Dma54rhs• 4 years ago

Russisn Ukraine war online propaganda front is on Telegram. On Twitter you have westerners charging their flags and what not.

ForHackernews2• 4 years ago

Twitter was instrumental in the Arab Spring

It absolutely was not, and only twitter-humping westerners would have you thinking that it was. No, a wikipedia article is not evidence.

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/1/27/the-social-medi...

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21428596-400-was-the-...

https://phys.org/news/2013-01-social-media-aided-didnt-arab....

skybrian• 4 years ago

It's true that most of us are just watching the war in Ukraine, and I think it's important to keep that in perspective; our role is that of the audience. Talking among ourselves doesn't do much but it's not harmful either.

But it seems like the geolocation folks are actually participating in the war? Not to mention the donations and helping the refugees. (More of that in Europe.)

karaterobot• 4 years ago

It's not necessary for everyone to use Twitter, or social media in general, for it to affect the culture. And if he can admit that, then most of his objections to Haidt's article sound more like misunderstandings of it.

TimPC2• 4 years ago

Hard disagree, the objections are still quite legitimate, especially the point about dodging accusations of racism and sexism. Haidt in particular seems to subscribe to the idea that if it was appropriate in 1950 it’s appropriate now. Centrists won’t win if they can’t address 2022 values.

ismaildonmez• 4 years ago

Haidt in particular seems to subscribe to the idea that if it was appropriate in 1950 it’s appropriate now.

Can you please quote the relevant sections that made you reach this argument? I did read a lot of Haidt’s work and I’d disagree on this conclusion.

hgazx2• 4 years ago

The other day I finished reading Amusing Ourselves to Death and I wondered what a similar book about the age of social media would’ve said.

sigmoid10• 4 years ago

I think the book's theme translates pretty well from TV to social media. It's just faster response times, more energetic, higher dopamine release etc. But all the core issues that were raised are more or less the same.

jseliger• 4 years ago

Here you go: https://press.stripe.com/the-revolt-of-the-public

hgazx2• 4 years ago

Oh, thanks!

nemothekid• 4 years ago

The original[1] article is also intriguing and not the analysis of someone I expect to see from someone who describes themselves as center-right. I think this line is a great allegory for my overall frustration with political discourse online:

The story of baby boomer extremism could be told by analyzing networks of professors and students on elite campuses—but if that story did not also mention Vietnam, Watergate, the end of the civil rights movement, or the 1970s energy crisis, the average reader would conclude that the essayist had lost that decade’s thread.

My personal take has been that our problems have less to do "free speech" and "media decisiveness" and more to do with how America's economic system today has left most people on the edge of destitution and are left people too tired to engage meaningfully with politics. There is a huge chasm between the policies we actually need and what gets debated about daily. I would consider this a leftist position, so I'm excited to read what this author proposes.

[1] https://www.city-journal.org/our-problems-arent-procedural

owisd• 4 years ago

Twitter isn't some closed ecosystem comprising only its own users talking to each other. Journalists are all on it looking for 'public opinion' that then makes it into television and print, despite Twitter not being representative of public opinion at all.

johnchristopher• 4 years ago

I once heard a journalist saying almost these exact words, on air, and still blaming Twitter for spreading inaccuracies and misinformation (edit: and most importantly "a inaccurate assessment of the general opinion"). I am still baffled (Léa Salamé, for those who know).

deltarholamda• 4 years ago

Journalists, being people, are lazy. And if they can get away with never leaving their couch and still do something that can be called "journalism," then they will do it.

Every few months, some journalist will drive out into the hinterlands of America and discover that other 97% of America that isn't on Twitter 10 hours a day. They then write some chin-stroking piece about "bubbles," go to sleep, wake up, and then go back to the couch and the Twitter app, having learned nothing.

I get it. Nobody wants to become a journalist and cover spaghetti suppers for the baseball team's Booster Club. But in reality, that's something like 90+% of ordinary people's lives.

cbozeman2• 4 years ago

Then they should all quit their jobs and learn to code.

Being a journalist is supposed to be a hard job with a strict code of ethics, and journalists are supposed to police their own, coming hard exceptionally hard on lazy journalists.

seadan835• 4 years ago

Less the journalists and more the newsrooms. Politico news is cheap and gets eyeballs. Far easier than paying for investigative journalism, let alone having an embedded reporter hundreds of miles away, the newsrooms have been demanding profits and so "man bites dog" leads the news coverage.

emptyfile• 4 years ago

I'm always amused by how Americans view Twitter.

In my part of Europe, if journalists and politicians didn't use it like their English speaking counterparts do, it would be as relevant as Google+.

cbozeman2• 4 years ago

Yeah, I don't understand why Twitter didn't take off around the world.

It's excellent for what it designed to be: a "quick take" sharing site / link sharing site.

It's awful (like most social media) for in-depth thoughtful discussion, because the platform is, by design, geared towards the above-mentioned use cases.

paganel• 4 years ago

A little meta, but I also heartily recommend the comments on that blog-post, reminded me of the golden days of the blogosphere.

photochemsyn• 4 years ago

Source article thesis that this article is a response to (the Atlantic piece):

"Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three. To see how, we must understand how social media changed over time—and especially in the several years following 2009."

Social scientists have reproducibility problems in their work, so that's more like an ideological opinion than anything else, but if we take it as given, here's the gist of the response:

"First, social media (and Twitter in particular) cannot account for a societal wide decline in trust or a societal wide rise in radicalism and partisanship. The number of active twitter users is just too small... Second: the better explanation for declining institutional trust is declining institutional performance... Third, what we call “cancel culture” is not a new feature of American life. It has always been with us."

Another possibility is that the chattering classes believe they're more important than they are, and more fundamental economic and ecological factors are behind the deepening cracks in the facade of social stability. A society divided into wealthy pockets and impoverished wastelands is simply not a stable society, and the ecological impacts of resource exhaustion and climate extremes certainly aren't helping with the resilience factor.

The combination of economic and climatic stress has destroyed entire civilizations in the past. Modern technology (for example, the ability to dig deep wells for water, the ability to generate power via different means if one source is exhausted, etc.) can buffer this to some extent, if there's enough social cohesion to ensure that technological benefits are available to all. Otherwise, the historical record points to civil war being the most likely outcome.

xbar• 4 years ago

"Of course millennials and zoomers are radicalized; the formative political events of their youth were a string of national disasters. "

I do think the author was paying attention to the news in the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s.

NoraCodes• 4 years ago

Do you mean "do not"?

Barrin92• 4 years ago

I'm honestly baffled the author even took the time to write a response to the original article that seriously claims that America over the last decade is uniquely stupid and polarized or that the twitter button is responsible for it.

Apparently Haidt had no recollection of the 60s, cities on fire during the civil rights era, civil rights leaders shot, presidents shot, one because a guy wanted to impress Jodie Foster, students on campus shot in Kent State, Jonestown or any of the other gazillion insanities of American cultural life. The last ten years have been, by comparison, mild.

Twitter is at the end of the day an entropy generating noise machine of the chattering classes and an epiphenomenon. Internet iscourse is a product not a cause of conflict at the material level and as far as it historically goes relatively boring these days.

dangerface• 4 years ago

Lots of baseless bs

First claim that social media can't be responsible because less than 50% of the us population use twitter, but that ignores the other social media platforms 70% of americans use facebook [1], the author has cherry picked a specific social media platform so they can hand wave it.

The second and third argument is simply acknowledging that political correctness is a tribal thing and that younger generations who are more likely to use social media are now deciding whats politically correct.

This is all fine but the author then assumes that the millennial's are making decisions based on boomer iraq war policies not the social media platform they use daily, the author provides no evidence or reason for this speculation / conclusion.

The only thing that supports the author is that they have correctly identified tribalism but we already know we are more tribal and radical the question is why . The authors answer is the iraq war and policies from the 90s but most zoomers have never heard of this and most millennial see it as history. Millennials don't spend their time reminiscing about boomer wars, this is a very boomer perspective on current events.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/10/share-of-u-...

The world that Twitter never made

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