The beauty of the tweet

‘It was the nightingale, and not the lark,
that pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear’

Like many of you, for the past few years I have looked upon Twitter with nothing but derision.

What a worthless piece of tripe…Vapid. Time wasting. An egotistical platform for people to dribble bite-sized globules of gibberish. Yes, there are many messages I could have created about Twitter in 140 characters or less. And most of them would not be fit for repeating in genteel company.

But then my galaxy shifted. Like with the proverbial unfamiliar food before a small child, how did I know I didn’t like it if I had never really tried it? First, I dabbled. A couple months back I subscribed to a handful of Twitterers whose writing looked interesting. Then quickly I added a few more and a few more. My list grew to respectable proportions and I have now found myself on Twitter I.V.

Why? Because it’s timely. I use it to follow politics and news in my own personal areas of obsession – Thailand, India, Sri Lanka. Is it accurate? About as much as a fortune teller. Is it biased? Twitter allows any whacko to say whatever they want at any given moment. Is it valuable? Infinitely more than any other news source on the planet.

The beauty of Twitter is that it is a window on real-time conversations. For those, who have a critical mind, who enjoy filtering the truth from the lens of the sources and their surroundings, who like to read between the lines, who take pleasure in deconstructing people’s strategies, who embrace the chance to get to the bottom of a situation by parsing out meaning from all the conscious and unconscious forces shaping what people do or don’t say, Twitter is a gold mine. It is access to information. It allows you to observe conversations and debates and take part if you wish. It enables you to see the rifts and fault lines before they get smoothed over several hours later in your daily newspaper. Whereas traditional news media is a monologue, Twitter, like any social media, is dialogue. Twitter is subjectivity before the news is watered down into what goes by the somewhat-deceptive banner of objectivity (which in reality is just information that has been stripped down to bare bones and then pressed into the mould of whichever publication is distributing it).

Certainly you have to treat each tweet with a dose of healthy skepticism. There are countless twitface Casanovas trying to sell a lark for a nightingale and vice versa. But take into account the ulterior motives and there is a beauty and eloquence and authenticity to those 140 characters unlike what you will find anywhere else.

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