Hey there! "theopposition" is using Twitter...

I won’t make any bones about it: Twitter has always ticked me off. I am not an old man or resistant to change, and as much of my life is consumed by Web 2.0 as the next guy. But I don’t understand the need to give the entire world a one-sentence update on your life from wherever you might happen to be. It might be the one thing on which I agree with Keith Olbermann; the left wing’s Ann Coulter-cum-Bill O’Reilly recently named Twitter the “Worst Person in the World.” (Even funnier to me was Conan O’Brien’s recent prediction that, in the year 3000, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook would merge into one social networking conglomerate, YouTwitFace.)

My main beef with Twitter has been how it has contributed to the narrowing of our attention spans. The days of reading through a newspaper gave way to watching a half-hour of news summaries. Then that gave way to watching a digest of headlines on the 24-hour news cycle’s tickers as they made their programming boring enough that you’d have to pay attention to the ticker. Then that gave way to shorter and shorter online news alerts until, finally, we got single sentences. The only step left now is single words and monosyllabic expressions of emotion; Twitter will no doubt give way to Cheeper, on which I would simply summarize this blog entry as “grr”.

Yet recent events have made me wonder if watching the twits around me had caused me to judge the action of Tweeting too quickly. As Iran is cracking down on the release of unfiltered information, they have been at best refusing to renew visas, as in the case of NBC’s Richard Engel, and at worst detaining journalists and bloggers. Yet the information is getting out, by way of Iranian computers and mobile devices using Facebook and, yes, Twitter. As a result of the increased activity coming out of Iran, the US government urged, and Twitter decided, to suspend scheduled site maintenance to make sure they were still live.

Now, in Keith Olbermann’s and my defense, none of us could have seen this coming. Yet in spite of our spite, Twitter has given people on the ground an opportunity to give dispatches from the ground. CNN and other news agencies, with their correspondents cut off, are turning to Twitter for accurate (and some inaccurate) pictures of the situation in Tehran. And in spite of the Iranian government’s threats of legal action against those whose tweets might “create tension” and attempts to shut off internet and mobile phone service, the Tehran Tweetolution rolls on.

So, if Twitter has enabled us to break through the Iran Curtain, does this mean the end of unfree media? Not so fast. It is an extremely important development that some people around the world (NB: I said “some) have the means to get real information out from states that attempt to control the flow of real information. Yet we still need to strengthen our efforts to make sure free media gets in to these states. One thing is for sure, though-never again will I sell a new social networking technology short until I know for certain that it is completely useless.