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Politics in 140 characters or less
Under normal circumstances Twitter merely records banalities, but now it has become the favoured platform for the political world.
- By Gideon Rachman, Financial Times
- Published: 22:48 July 2, 2009
Under normal circumstances Twitter merely records banalities, but now it has become the favoured platform for the political world.
Most days I get an e-mail informing me that somebody or other is "now following you on Twitter!" I find this slightly baffling, since I hardly ever tweet - that is, broadcast my every thought and deed to the world, using 140 characters or fewer.
I tried Twitter out on the night of the US presidential election in November and did not like it much. One of my very last tweets was: "This is possibly the most moronic form of journalism I have ever done." Since then, I have fallen largely silent.
But now I am having to rethink my disdain. Twitter is the most fashionable political medium of the moment, widely hailed for the role it played in allowing Iranian demonstrators to stay in touch with each other and avoid censorship.
The US State Department was so impressed by the role the microblogging service was playing it asked Twitter to delay an update that would have taken it off air. A headline in The Los Angeles Times summarised the conventional wisdom when it roared: "Tyranny's new nightmare: Twitter."
Even before Iran, Twitter was becoming increasingly trendy. Everybody from Senator John McCain to Britain's Foreign Office was tweeting. The whole phenomenon has made me belatedly accept that the most important and profound political messages can, in fact, usually be encapsulated in 140 characters.
The power of extreme brevity was brought home to me in another context when I told a friend that I was thinking of writing a book. He said: "It won't work unless you can summarise the argument in a single sentence that can fit on Twitter". Initially, I found this a repulsive idea. How stupid, I thought - name me a great book that can be summarised in 140 characters? But when I considered the matter further, I realised that most great works of political philosophy could be summarised on Twitter. Indeed, their very greatness lies in the fact that they can be boiled down to a sentence.
The Communist Manifesto is often summarised by the very twitterable: "Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains." (Marx's original version was less succinct.)
Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, would also have been a natural on Twitter. "The greatest happiness of the greatest number" is fewer than 50 characters. Kant is a bit more long-winded. But even the categorical imperative makes it under Twitter's limbo bar: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law," is fewer than 140 characters.
There are some great works that have not produced that single killer sentence that encapsulates the whole thing. Still, even they can usually be summarised in a tweet. Machiavelli's The Prince comes down to "nice guys finish last".
Twitter, it seems, is the ideal medium for both politics and philosophy. In practice, however, the tweetings of Western politicians and civil servants are often disappointing, even alarming.
Colleen Graffy, one of the first senior American diplomats to latch on to Twitter, was criticised for tweeting about her visit to the Apple store, as Israel invaded Gaza. I was worried to find that on the morning of the North Korean nuclear test, Britain's Foreign Office twittered: "North Korea - what are your views?" This sounded a bit forlorn.
McCain is certainly keen - and is currently twittering three or four times a day. His tweets are authentically personal, unlike the wooden scheduling updates, filed by the likes of Ban Ki-moon, secretary-general of the United Nations.
But I cannot say McCain's twitters fill me with regret that he is not sitting in the Oval Office. They seem to be a mixture of sports scores and self-congratulation. He crowed recently about the number of followers he has on Twitter: "800,000!!! Think we can make it to one million?"
The problem is that Twitter simultaneously encourages extreme brevity and endless communication. Each shot is short but you can keep twittering all day if you want - and many addicts seem to do just that. If Marx really had lived in the age of Twitter, he would probably not have been sending out thunderous political messages. It is more likely that his Twitter feed would have read: "Just arrived at British Museum. Going for a cup of tea."
Marx never got a chance to consider the importance of Twitter to a successful revolution. But my feeling is that it is mainly hype. The French revolutionaries somehow managed in 1789, without being able to tweet to each other: "Big demo planned outside Bastille." The Iranians of 2009 look likely to fail, in spite of the invention of Twitter in the intervening 220 years.
Still, even if Twitter will not clinch an Iranian revolution, it does a fine job of providing snap-shots of unfolding events. Under normal circumstances, Twitter is a compendium of banalities. But in Iran, the medium's terseness and immediacy came into its own.
One day some great thinker will have the time and the perspective to make sense of the real role played by Twitter and the communications revolution in the challenge to the Iranian clerics. Whatever the ultimate conclusion, I strongly advise that it is summarised in 140 characters or fewer.
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