The first-ever Twitter political debate, an exchange between McCain and Obama reps over tech policy, is, sadly … incomprehensible. There are various ways to view it, and all are confusing – you can’t tell who is saying what to whom when. Because they are talking about policy positions, there’s a fair amount of jargon to begin with; when you can’t follow the thread of an individual’s thinking, or the back-and-forth, the jargon loses all context.
The serendipitous randomness of Twitter works against the concept of an organized debate, where you want to hear what just a few people are saying, and have them interact with each other. That can’t happen when you have to sort through random noise, due to graphical inelegance or just people leaping into the conversation. The Summize version of the debate, for example, is effectively being auto-spammed by a Twitter account devoted to “twaiku” – Twitter haiku – because one of the participants called the tweets “policy haiku.”
I like the idea of political debate as a kind of dharma combat, where speed and smarts push the discussion in interesting directions, and people are following it wherever, on phones or computers. With a usable interface, prudent management, and participants who are good at the 140-character form, we might get that. Without those things, this becomes like those mind-numbing primary debates, where you had a scrum of candidates operating under “30-second” rules. At worst, you just get a parody, like a text message political debate (BHO is GR8!!)
But I question the usefulness of this for an actual, wonk-oriented debate about policy. Such discussions need context and room for explanation to be useful/informative. Participants ought to be marshaling arguments, not just hurling links at one another.
Update: The debate with better graphics.
