Are We Saying That Twitter Creates Revolutions? Depends on Who You Mean By “We”
[update (2:28pm): I wrote this post very fast. Because of that, it’s a little opaque in places. So what it really about? I’m trying to work through a feeling that, even though no one has said Twitter causes revolutions, a bunch of people feel like somebody, somewhere has said it. And while some folks, as Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis argue, are deliberately distorting these claims, other people are just plain confused who really has said what. So: why? Why are we confused?
That’s the background.]
—
As anyone who has had the misfortune to read an article in an academic journal knows, one of the defining characteristics of serious academic work is a deep reluctance to make strong causal claims. In other words, most academics will only say something “does” something to something else in an endlessly hedged, footnoted, hesitant manner. And then they’ll be sure, if they’re doing their job, to give you all the reasons why that causal thing could just as well be other things, if the study was done differently. And oh, also, see my followup piece in the next journal where I advance the ball another 5cm down the playing field.
This hesitancy, I think, is admirable. Empirical reality is complicated. And when you spend your entire professional life reading a bunch of really smart people saying a whole bunch of things that totally contradict each other, it’s hard to take your own findings too seriously. After all, Plato and Aristotle couldn’t agree. What makes us low-grade Assistant Faculty think we’ve figured it out?
As anyone who has had the misfortune to consume a lot of journalism knows, one of the hallmarks of journalism (especially of the TV variety) is an overwhelming urge to say that something *totally causes* something else. Usually in about 15 seconds, between commercials. The way this used to work is that some professor or think-tanker in a producer’s rolodex would get a call, show up on TV, say something smart that was usually largely disconnected from his actual scholarship (and yes, it was usually a “he,” sadly) and go home, feeling slightly dirty but excited to have been on the television.
This desire on the part of journalism to say something really does something to something else is, I think, admirable. After all, reality is complicated, and if we’re going to live in the world (journalists say), we need to know what’s going on without it being so complicated. We don’t have a time to read a bunch of footnotes.
What the internet has done is that it has totally blurred these genres. Professors now blog in ways more or less beholden to the scholarly conventions of causal hesitancy. TV shows stream online. There’s an entirely new genre of really intelligent journalism, less beholden to the “talking head” syndrome I discussed earlier. And really smart people— some of whom teach in universities, some of whom don’t— are creating a new breed of digital public intellectual, synthesizing academic research, journalism, good writing, and a willingness speak authoritatively on important, current topics
So, why would all this smart research and commentary have created more confusion about whether social media causes revolutions, rather than less?
The fact is— it hasn’t. The intelligent, nuanced commentary online about social media and political change far outweighs the dreck. But what has happened is that I think we, as a society and culture, are still trapped in the old mindset where we either had to be simplistic and certain or nuanced and complicated. Our methods of digesting debates have not caught up to our media system and our technological reality. Instead, the boundaries of the playing field have gotten way less clear, and with confusion comes panic. We don’t have the conventional “message container” cues by which we used to judge an argument (is it being made on television? ignore it. is it being made in a journal? believe it, but know it wont help you very much. does so-and-so making it have a PhD? who cares?) And this panic has created a situation where some folks feel like “everyone” is saying Twitter causes revolutions, even though no one worth reading is actually saying anything of the sort.
I think that maybe digital media has created a new sense of a kind of “feeling in the air” — largely unattributable to actual individuals, but powerful nonetheless.
We need our conventions of argumentation to catch up with our intelligence.
[most of this sadly linkless post is indebted to thoughts spurred by Jay Rosen’s “Twitter Can’t Topple Dictators Article”.]
