Micro-blogging’s claims to greatness don’t ring true

[Stuart Cosgrove]

Advocates of Twitter have made some grandiose claims about microblogging. One recurring argument is that it’s a tool for holding power to account. It’s a noble objective but falls far short of those lofty ambitions.

Newspapers and television are achingly clear about their deficiencies. They fleetingly reach audiences, engage them in a brief stranglehold of information and entertainment, and watch them escape back to real life.

Twitter is brasher and has the self-confident naïvety of youth. It boasts about its role in electing Barack Obama and the part it played in energising the Iranian protest movement. No wonder it’s not had time to make money.

I am naturally sceptical. When technologies are paraded as solutions to deeply embedded social problems I look for flaws. Tools can play an enabling role - the garden spade can testify to that - but life’s big challenge is not digging the path, it’s finding a way through the forest of democracy.

It was Hannah Arendt who shone a powerful torch on the darkest part of the forest describing the Holocaust as the “banality of evil”. How might those words be redeployed? Twitter has played a cameo-role in exposing evil and stars in a cavalcade of banality.

Real time micro-blogging is a phenomenal tool for instant self-referencing but we should not be so thrilled by its newness or audacity to ask a hard question - is it a true friend of democracy?

At the height of the Iranian rebellion, Twitter adjusted a technical schedule at the request of the American government and helped the protests to thrive. Meanwhile, a genocidal war in Sri Lanka was prosecuted in dark anonymity. Thousands of Tamils were killed. Both are important in the grand narrative of freedom but one was noticed and another was missed.

You can understand why Twitter co-operated with American foreign policy; the buzz of getting noticed can be a powerful elixir. But by the standards of conventional news journalism it was a capitulation to power, and a desperately naïve response to the thorny values of impartiality.

Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, is adamant that the power of new media to search and share overturned a legal injunction shielding toxic-waste giants Trafigura. It was a timely intervention but the heavy lifting had been done by years of investigative journalism.

Micro-blogging has yet to register a killer-blow against power or secrecy and exacerbates a key threat to democracy: indifference. Twitter surfs but it cannot mine and has yet to impact beyond those areas that already benefit from a cacophony of celebrity and media attention.

As I read the endless reams of publicity Twitter generates, it’s the flaws that vex me. Snapshots of Demi Moore’s ‘butt’ registered more attention on Twitter than the modern-day internment camps of Manik Farm. If Silicon Valley’s latest rich boys are happy to take excited phone calls from Obama then they can take stick for banal distractions too. Democracy is a long term project, not a brief buzz of attention.

This comment piece also appears at Brodcastnow - http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/comment/in-my-view/micro-bloggings-cl..." target="_blank">here

The image shows Tamil civilians inside the internment camps at Manik Farm - a tweet free zone

Stuart Cosgrove is chairing a session on ‘Digital Democracy and Society’ at The Media Festival in Manchester on 20 November.