So I’ve signed off of Facebook, and I told you why a few days ago. Today, I want to tell you why I switched to Twitter as a better social network for my purposes. The reason is simple: I have had bad (bad, bad, bad, bad, bad) experiences on both sides of the political aisle. As a result, I have learned to be cautious about making politics the centerpiece of my engagement with my friends. I have outlined exactly why in my post on how I got through grad school in the age of political correctness.
My Facebook friends are constantly reminding me that Twitter is nothing but short status updates. While that is true, Twitter allows me more control over the flow of information to me than the limitation that Facebook places on me of having to personally know someone before they will allow me to follow them. I don’t personally know many poets or artists, so I can’t friend them on Facebook; but on Twitter I can search for poets and artists and I can follow them. And I do. This makes my engagement with the world of poetry much more balanced and complete than my engagement with my limited supply of people that I know personally.
This fits in with my notion of how I should engage the world. I should be able to take in all sorts of points of view and I should be able to expand of discard them based on my own experience.
But Is It News?
This brings up the question of whether Twitter is serious forum for journalism or whether it is simply, as many believe, a vehicle of personal perspective without the intermediary of any sort of editorial control. This was the subject of a Business Week forum recently. In their forum, aptly entitled “Twitter Isn’t Journalism,” Michael De Monte took the pro-position (that it wasn’t), while Brian Solis took the position of con (that it is).
De Monte writes of “Russell Williams, a former Canadian Air Force colonel”:
How did a respected base commander manage to live a double life as a sexual predator?
This question can’t be answered in 140-character chunks.
I couldn’t agree more. But even as De Monte poses the question as one of 140 characters not being enough to do the ‘full story’ of the sexually predatory base commander, he doesn’t address the role of editorial decision making in the skewing of the news away from its stated goal of being ‘objective.’
I for one don’t think that we can have a perfectly (or even fairly) objective media. I learned this from Nietzsche, who talked about all positions in the universe being motivated by interested interpreters, though I am sure that others had thought of it before and certainly since. It is one of the reasons that, though I don’t always agree with him, I respect Limbaugh for his early adoption of the principle of targeted knowledge in the age of journalistic objectivity. And it’s why I can’t agree with Rockefeller’s calls for a return to ‘fair and balanced’ news under the guise of a return to the Fairness Doctrine.
De Monte frames the question in terms of editors who come between the raw facts, which are just one person’s ‘subjective’ response to a single event, and the shaping of a story into ‘unbiased’ news story by editors and writers who collect all sorts of information from many sources. I don’t believe that any editor or writer is furnished with an unbiased mind. I wonder what he would say if I was there to ask him a question about journalistic bias. I’ll bet he would say (although I can’t possibly know) that editors and writers have been trained to put bias out of their minds. I wonder what he would say when I start laughing for ten minutes at his thoroughly naïve response. I can’t know that, either, I suppose.
I want to be clear here. Editorial bias is okay with me, because I trust myself to make my own judgments through my own (biased) mind. My mind has been trained to look for bias in myself and others and to put information on a firmer (though not completely firm) basis through gathering news from as many sources as possible. I also have been trained to be skeptical when someone tells me to trust them implicitly because they are completely honest. That may be so, but I prefer to be more cautious.
Brian Solis responds that
If we define journalism as the reporting of news, then yes, it qualifies as a new form of journalism. With every new iterative update, social graphs transform into a highly organized information distribution system that resembles an Amber Alert network for the social Web—with far greater speed, reach, impact, and resonance. To deny it is to deny the voice of humanity.
Is it merely a recitation of the facts? Only after news media catch up with the news that had already trended for at least an hour before they could respond. I call this the information divide, the time between a news event, when it breaks on Twitter, and when the news media finally reports it. This is why news teams are now monitoring Twitter streams much in the same way medical professionals monitor the pulse in the ER.
So he thinks that Tweets are matters of ‘fact’ which breaks on Twitter and the news reporters who gather and digest the news. Just the other day I had the experience of posting a Tweet on the death of Elizabeth Taylor minutes before the Chicago Tribune reported it to me. But I’m not sure that even that experience makes the Twitter universe one of facts alone.
The reason I like Twitter better than other news sources if that I can avoid the editorial processes that have come to dominate the news since the advent of Limbaugh. The problem with the news these days is that everyone of ‘us’ is following the objective truth and everyone feels that it is up to ‘us’ to defend ‘the truth’ from the depredations of ‘them’ who are not in full and complete and whole possession of ‘the truth.’ I understand that this doesn’t sound silly and foolish to others, but I gotta tell ya, it sounds bat-crazy to me. I’m with Augustine who hungered after the truth but could only find that truth through the experience of faith (not reason) in the inimitable miracle of Jesus Christ. I don’t believe in the miracle of the resurrection of Jesus (I wasn’t there so I can’t know whether it was true anymore than St. Paul or Jesus can know; that’s why they put so much faith in faith), but I am a little disturbed when someone tells me to put my faith in them rather than the experience of my own eyes.
Why I Prefer Twitter to Mainstream News Sources
I actually prefer to think of myself in the world in terms of art and poetry, which holds out the possibility of complete humanity, and not in terms of the world of politics, which points its adherents to vaunt the politics of ‘us’ as whole and complete and to decry the politics of ‘them’ as wholly wrong and possibly (probably) evil.
Having said that, I’m not sure that art holds out the possibility of announcing the future to the rest of us before we have arrived there, as the vestiges of the avant-garde of the 60s and 70s thought. Instead, art has stood on its laurels as new ideas have come without being absorbed by the art world. Such a posture makes artists of the select group that accepts the premises of the art world(s) while excluding those who do not agree. The basis of exclusion of some people—and believe me, many people don’t agree with the sometimes ridiculous conclusions of art-world insiders—turns art-world insiders from inclusive people who want more folks to appreciate art on any terms into a group of purists who declare themselves as arbiters of taste for ‘us’ who may determine matters of taste for the rest of ‘them’s like me.
This exclusion has happened to me more I would like to (or can) remember in grad school. Then, I used to couch my language in ‘politically correct’ terms. After I got out of academia, it just makes me crazy. I had also learned that there is not much you can to when you are faced with people who know they are right and that you (in this case me) are wrong. I also had learned that their opinions don’t really matter much and can easily be ignored.
The same thing has been happening with mainstream news sources who, after the arrival of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News have been adamant in their insistence that ‘us’ are the ‘real’ news and that ‘them’ are not news at all. That may be but, how could you prove it except by a petitio principii (look it up here) by which you rely on your own premises. The game’s changed since I was young and there were only five English language channels on television. If you are still using principles that held true when I was a young man, then I would advise you to look more closely at your fundamental premises. They may not (I would say they aren’t) the same now as when I grew up.
I like Twitter because it allows me to move back to the center of a universe that has been decentered of self as a guiding principle. Sure, I know that Tweets are lowly pieces of unfiltered interpretations of events, but I don’t believe in uninterpreted information. I certainly don’t trust the news media to draw out the ‘truth’ through a lengthy intermediary editorial process (is it just me who finds that notion absurd?).
More likely, I feel that the New York Times will use that intermediate editorial time to align their take on the news with the liberal slant, just as Fox News will align their take on events with the conservative slant. That doesn’t make me want to give up watching either Fox News or reading the New York Times. Both have feeds that I use to monitor the news. But both are extremely focused on relatively narrow areas of life. They are centered on politics almost exclusively and that only on three coastal cities (Washington, New York, and LA). The rest of ‘them’ who have not flown from ‘flyover’ country to the coastal cities where ‘authentic being’ is available don’t get a voice in the national conversation.
That’s too bad, but ‘that’s the way it is.’