Twitter received some major news coverage for its fanatical userbase following the recent Iran election. The tone of the media reports is more or less that of wonder. It seems to be a common theme to assume that social networking is completely useless, then make a news story about it when it is useful. Add to the mix the attempts of Iranians trying to inform the rest of the world against the Internet filtering put in place by the Government and there's a convenient David vs Goliath theme. How dramatic.
I think using Twitter to engage in political matters is a dumb idea. There's simply not enough scope in it for intelligent discussion. This evening I got caught in a little argument about free speech and gay rights. After about 4 maximum-size tweets back and forth we realised that we'd mostly missed each other's points. This is not an efficient way to do business.
If you have something intelligent to say about Iran or another political matter you're doing yourself a disservice by trying to express it on Twitter. Get yourself a blog or something---if you're really as interesting and intelligent as you think you are, people will read it and share it.
Political matters are complicated beasts and I believe that they are better served by a suitable length of prose so that your readers can under your context, your reasoning and your conclusions fully.
I suspect that a large proportion of the Twitter Iran enthusiasts would find themselves a lot less insightful than they thought about how to deal with the whole situation if they tried to string together a short piece of writing explaining what and why rather than sitting about all day retweeting URLs of things they found interesting.
You don't have to write to be a good thinker, but you do have to communicate your good thoughts effectively if they're going to be any use to anyone. Something more like a blog makes it easier for others to comment (again with a decent length of text) and get some intelligent debate happening.
Once we get some intelligent debate rather than token snippets of support for whichever side you like most, perhaps we can use the Internet to do some politics. And society will be better for it.
One Comment
You forget one thing. Just because something should happen, doesn't mean it ever will. People will keep using Twitter to spread the political messages precisely because it doesn't require any effort or thinking.
Jay Leno once said, "Here in America, we want everybody to know about the good things we do anonymously." I think the same can be said of serial Twitter users. They don't care about the Iran election itself, simply that people see them caring.
Add to this the fact that pretty much nobody has a life interesting enough to make watching their Twitter worthwhile, and Twitter seems like the most amazing invention that shouldn't exist.