What should concern Bill Keller is that we’re a nation of morons. I don’t know whether Twitter and Facebook make this problem better or worse, but i know that social media didn’t cause it. I also know that employing people like Judy Miller and William Safire was at best a passive way of aggressively misinforming people on a regular basis. When the New York Times lies it’s especially pernicious, because the left side of the country’s political culture actually has a tendency to believe the New York Times. Also, too, the intelligentsia of our country reads the paper like it is some kind of prerequisite to being taken seriously to know what was in last week’s Style section. If you were seriously wondering whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or served a catered lunch to Mohammed Atta then the New York Times gave you the wrong answers. It made smart people stupid. I don’t think Twitter ever did that.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
7 Comments
Recent Posts
- Day 14: Louisiana Senator Approvingly Compares Trump to Stalin
- Day 13: Elon Musk Flexes His Muscles
- Day 12: While Elon Musk Takes Over, We Podcast With Driftglass and Blue Gal
- Day 11: Harm of Fascist Regime’s Foreign Aid Freeze Comes Into View
- Day 10: The Fascist Regime Blames a Plane Crash on Nonwhite People
Applause. Something that needed to be said.
Compare:
The New York Times drove the hunting of a President and a totally political impeachment.
The New York Times led the rush to war in Iraq with Judy Miller’s breathless coverage of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.
Twitter and Facebook allowed folks in Tunisia to throw out ben Ali and folks in Egypt to throw out Mubarak. Not the cause but the medium that could not be controlled.
Twitter allow most of America, if they sought it, to know what was going on in the Capitol Rotunda in Madison, Wisconsin–when the corporate media was trying to black out coverage.
Now tell me who’s serious.
Of course, seriousness depends on the sender and receiver of messages and not the branding or technology of the medium. The editorial staff of the Washington Post and the New York times feign seriousness. Act as the arbiters of “seriousness”. But the only thing they seem to be serious about is their status within the Village and the number of zeros on their paychecks.
They can have as many zeroes as they want on their paychecks, so long as there aren’t any other numbers alongside them.
Also, too, the intelligentsia of our country reads the paper like it is some kind of prerequisite to being taken seriously to know what was in last week’s Style section.
Funny!
I agree with TarheelDem because I almost always do. And what BooMan said, too.
But I’ll add that FB and twitter (which I don’t use) do something more than shorten memory spans. By constraining the number of characters I can use to communicate I feel like FB actually fragmented my thinking process. It doesn’t allow long deep rational presentations (who reads “Notes”) wherein I actually lay out my line of reasoning for myself. The nefarious aspect is that my lazy logic lobe LIKES this! It’s so much easier to say–Bam!–that’s what I think/feel instead of explaining why or where it came from.
I believe that in some insidious way it led me to comment less on this blog. I felt like, hey, I’ve kinda communicated with some people today; I’ve met my quota for socializing. And it’s so tiresome to come up with more than 420 characters to express myself. I’ve read posts you’ve presented to which I wanted to make a comment but the effort required began to feel huge. FB made my long-form thought process LAZY.
So. I started writing a SF&F novel! That’s diverted my attention from politics for a while now and I needed the break. But, it’s also restored… let me call it… my blather-function. See? Here I’ve said all kinds of shit instead of a sound-bite! I’m relearning how to contribute a somewhat cogent comment. (Maybe?)
So yeah, I find myself in some agreement with Keller for slightly different reasons. The printing press slowly killed oral memory. Calculators did reduce most of us to being mathematical morons. Typing on computer keypads really did kill penmanship. Typesetting software killed REAL typesetting and digital photography has made most people forget what a genuinely sharp, lab-processed photograph looks like. But, the limits of social media platforms may be breaking up our actual ability to THINK!
Excellent post. If it wouldn’t kill too many brain cells, I would love to see what you would have come up with to try to communicate anything remotely proximate to this in 240 characters or less.
I find that facebook and twitter actually augment rather than fragment my thinking. I like being forced to be concise from time to time. It makes an excellent counterpoint to working at novel length which what I primarily write.
Twitter doesn’t have sections that are essentially run by DoD or State.
Twitter didn’t decide that the definition of torture doesn’t apply to anything done by American officials.