Is Twitter “bad”? Does it destroy your ability to concentrate, immerse you in ideas you are only half-interested in, condemning you to an intellectually impoverished lifetime of skimming and linking? This is clearly a danger for some people. But obviously life is more complex than a stark, either-or choice.
So I don’t understand why George Packer insists that Twitter is a pernicious, totalizing force in the media landscape, something that by its very nature swallows minds whole – as opposed to simply another tool, if a potentially distracting one. Some of the issues he raises in his two posts are real ones we all grapple with – how does swimming in a stream of constantly updating information from social media affect your concentration, your ability to manipulate ideas, to create?
But the online debate that he kicked off quickly devolved into silliness. Because Packer merely raises that question in order to tell us what he already thinks he knows. He doesn’t engage it directly or explore its facets, its history, its social effects. He is apparently unwilling to use his awesome journalism talents, so expertly deployed in understanding complex, layered, unfolding situations in Iraq or elsewhere around the world, on what’s right in front of his face.
The problem here isn’t Twitter. Or Packer’s resistance to technological change, or to shifting patterns of media consumption and expression (which I believe is misplaced, but he can do whatever he likes on that front). It’s the odd, elegiac pose he takes. Packer’s principal worry is that a world devoted to the quiet contemplation of books is ending:
Just about everyone I know complains about the same thing when they’re being honest—including, maybe especially, people whose business is reading and writing. They mourn the loss of books and the loss of time for books. It’s no less true of me, which is why I’m trying to place a few limits on the flood of information that I allow into my head. The other day I had to books that my son had wantonly pulled down, most of them volumes from college days. I thumbed idly through a few urgently underlined pages of Kierkegaard’s “Concluding Unscientific Postscript,” a book that electrified me during my junior year, and began to experience something like the sensation middle-aged men have at the start of softball season, when they try sprinting to first base after a winter off. What a ridiculous effort it took!
But the problems Packer cites, from his own observations, have little to do with books, or reading, or the content of your Twitter stream. It’s random social media stuff that rubs him the wrong way. He expresses revulsion at the sight of people reading their during lunch conversations, or pressing their noses to their smartphones as they stroll into traffic. He bemoans the end of the print-media business model and blames Twitter.
In other words, this is not a serious argument about the future of media. (A sure sign of this is to denounce your critics as members of an “intolerant cult,” compare social media to Thalidomide, and, stripping the irony from Roland Hedley – mon dieu! – equate Twitter and thanatos.) Maybe we shouldn’t expect a thoughtful argument in what was, originally, just a rant on a blog, albeit the New Yorker’s. But of course if you use the New Yorker platform to attack Twitter and the media revolution, it’s going to attract attention and debate. So I wish he’d have devoted some thought to this.
Packer pines for the way things used to be. But were things really so great before social media fractured our attention? Trashy entertainments and distractions are as old as culture itself. There may be more avenues for trash and trivia today, and more ways to waste time, but the obsessions haven’t changed. The question is, is this a difference of degree or kind? If you say “kind,” what are the implications for reading, for writing, for neurology? For news, for politics? Can they really be all bad? If they aren’t all bad, where does the promise lie for the long forms and deep thoughts that Packer seeks?
Culture has existed for thousands of years and (one hopes) will exist for thousands or millions more. The avenues for cultural expression are always changing. New forms emerge with new technology and social and economic changes. Triviality contends with depth. Neither wins, ultimately. It’s fine to mourn the past, but if you simply dig in and cling to your grief, it helps no one.
