The Twitter is the Message

Remember the scene in Annie Hall when Alvy and Annie are waiting in line at the movie theater? A pretentious college professor misrepresents Marshall McLuhan’s ideas about television, and an exasperated Alvy pulls McLuhan himself into the scene to prove that the professor is wrong. Ah, if life were only like this, Alvy remarks.

Let’s talk about Marshall McLuhan for a minute. In the 1960s, McLuhan theorized about modern media and the development of television. His best-known contribution was his emphasis on studying the effects of the form of the media, rather than what the media conveyed. He’s the one who came up with the famous phrase, “The Medium is the Message”. He explained that if you don’t understand the medium, you don’t fully understand the message. McLuhan studied the unique characteristic of television, as opposed to, say radio, and explained how those characteristics affect us.

Which brings us to Twitter, the new media of the moment.

As you probably know, Twitter’s defining feature is its 140 character limit for each "tweet". Its other defining feature is that you can choose who to follow and who to ignore. Therefore, your “timeline” includes short messages from a list of previously curated Twitter accounts, ones with whom you have something in common, find interesting and/or agree with in some way.

Applying McLuhan’s insights to Twitter, we can see a number of both positive and negative effects.

The positives are that we're exposed to more viewpoints than ever before, to people from all over the world, and to more specialized knowledge than we ever thought was possible. Twitter also makes it easier to express ourselves, and gives us a platform with an incredible reach.

But there are also the negatives.

First, the reliance on followers. Your value on Twitter is unofficially measured by how many followers you have. The more followers you have, the more "relevant" you are, as your reach and influence literally grow. So when people tweet, there’s a strong incentive to tweet something provocative or outrageous, because that’s what brings the followers. The truth can often be boring, so why not make something up? Being polite and civil can be boring as well, so rudeness and abuse and are implicitly encouraged.

In a recent interview with the New York Times, Evan Williams, Twitter's founder, discussing the Internet generally, illustrated this point as follows:

"The trouble with the internet [...] is that it rewards extremes. Say you’re driving down the road and see a car crash. Of course you look. Everyone looks. The internet interprets behavior like this to mean everyone is asking for car crashes, so it tries to supply them."

Twitter's fundamental attention-seeking incentives cause people to create and promote these metaphorical car crashes.

Second, the 140 character limit can lead to misunderstandings and disagreements. It’s hard to properly convey your thoughts and views when so constrained. The combination of the character limit and the incentive to get attention degrades civil discourse. Even when the discussion stays civil, the character limit leads to inanity and half-baked thoughts. And because Twitter can be used anonymously, users can hurl abuse at others with minimal consequences. It's so easy to say something, but so hard to say anything meaningful.

Third, Twitter polarizes us. I won’t argue that we weren't polarized before Twitter (or the Internet) was invented, but I do think Twitter (and it's cousin, Facebook) has worsened the problem.

Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein wrote about this in his recent book, #Republic, describing how the ultra-customization of information has led to stronger and stronger echo chambers, environments where people are only exposed to information they already agree with. Sunstein focuses on the negative effects of these echo chambers on our democracy, but that’s only part of the story. When my timeline is filled with people who have the same views as me, and post articles that I fundamentally agree with, I am no longer challenged by opposing viewpoints. In fact, I gradually start thinking that my timeline accurately reflects reality. It's normal and objective, of course. Nobody is there to disagree with me, so I don't even register that disagreement is possible. If everyone around you takes it as a given that the Earth is flat, eventually that assumption will seep into your consciousness. And this relates to the "car crash" point as well: because provocative viewpoints get more attention, there's an incentive to perpetuate extreme partisanship views.

A recent survey showed that 9% of Twitter users get their news primarily from Twitter, which seems alarming no matter what your political views are. That percentage will certainly grow as people spend more time on social media and less time reading newspapers.

We need to be more aware of how the new media shift, exemplified by Twitter, is changing us and our society in fundamental ways. We have more freedom and access, but we’re also less analytical, more impatient, further stuck in our echo chamber, and have a shorter attention span than ever before.

If we could bring McLuhan into today’s scene, he’d probably applaud the benefits of technological progress, but also caution us to carefully study and address the negative impacts of this new media world. He’d likely tell us to read more books and long-form articles, focus on meaningful interpersonal interactions, and seek out smart people we disagree with.

If life were only like that.