Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Hannan / Politics @TwitteringTennesseePols Plz stop. K thx bai.
Posted by Caleb Hannan on Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 12:15 PM
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A thousand apologies if the headline above makes your head hurt. It's a failed attempt at Twitterese, the pidgin tongue of the newest, faddiest social networking service Twitter. For the 13 of you who still don't know what that word means, Twitter is like a simplified version of Facebook's status update, where you tell people, in 140 characters or less, what you're up to at that exact moment. And yes, it's about as navel-gazing as it sounds.
So what's this have to do with Tennessee politicians? Well, like a lot of elected leaders, they're Twittering. (Seems politics and solipsism go hand in hand. Who knew?) Congressman Zach Wamp, State Senator Jim Kyle and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ward Cammack are but three of the dozen (?) earnestly updating their constituents via Blackberry or Mac. And it's easy to understand why.
For a politician, the benefits of Twitter seem pretty obvious. If you're beholden to the people, why not communicate with them directly? It seems like a service completely in line with Democratic principles. A way to run end-around the traditional path of press release + summarizing article. For low name recognition candidates like Cammack, turning down any chance to bullhorn your way into the public consciousness would seem tactically negligent. And for politicians like Kyle, who we might otherwise know little about, Twitter can act as a "Stars, they're just like us!" humanizer; it's hard not to be endeared of a guy who proudly Tweets his daughter's third-place showing in a problem-solving tournament.
But, as political reporter Matt Bai points out in last weekend's New York Times Magazine, Twitter's blend of brevity and immediacy contributes little to meaningful debate. Which makes it the last thing politics needs right now...
Politics today is already too simplistic and binary, its news cycle more comically truncated and ephemeral than at any time in our history; in the age of e-mail, blogs and smartphones, we seem to react to everything with a kind of frantic, predictable impulse (Tax all the bonuses! Kill all the pirates!) rather than with a longer-term consideration of benefits and consequences. The last thing Washington needs right now is politicians who seek to convey the moment in even shorter slogans and commentators who feel the need to offer their wisdom with even more frequency and glib abandon than they already do on blogs and cable TV.Or, as our own Grumpy Old Man in Residence Jeff Woods so eloquently puts it: "Nobody gives a shit about their tweeting. Yesterday, Kyle tweeted that he's not saying whether he's running for governor until the session ends. One time, Kyle tweeted during a budget briefing from the governor. That's the closest thing to making news that I can recall. The rest of it's just trivial bullshit."
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