Every movement has a history. The one of Twitter It is a very lively modality that competes with the digital journalism. The first Twttr (original Twitter name) traveled through the biosphere in 2006. Since then the social network has grown, not without measure I must say: those who use it live with it, in it, and sometimes through it. It is a medium, both vital and oppressive, interesting and necessary: it informs and misinforms, shapes and deforms, sows and destroys. Interpreting the truth or falsehood of the message depends on the user: “tell me who you hang out with and I’ll tell you who you are”, is a proverb almost as old as the Bible; “Tell me who your favorite tweeters are and I will tell you what your concerns are and what your weaknesses and blunders are.”
One of the magic of this and others social media It lies in the figures of the tweeters: great academics, immense makers of fake news, promoters of “everything”, artists, drug traffickers, university professors, Trumpsians, journalists, millennials and countless nefarious politicians are users of the Twitter universe.
I wrote universe not by flying feather: the messages cover all the corners of the world map. It is difficult not to write or read tweets. Eating, working, washing up and spending as much time as necessary reading and forwarding tweets is part of that universe. The content and sometimes the veracity of the message do not always matter; it is important to read and share them: difficult to “be” without them. To stay on the map, it is essential to tweet and retweet the highlights.
As the years have passed, the exponential growth of doña and don Twitter, fortunately, space agency, has required modifications: a maximum of 140 characters, with time it allowed 280 and in 2020 the jump exceeded the biosphere and opened the door to voice tweets. . Tweeting is a sui generis pandemic; Unlike Covid-19 it does not kill, but, like our virus, it has no limits.
Twitter is not journalism but it competes with it. At first little by little and now quickly, it has become, for more and more people, an indispensable source of information. Every “important” event is recorded by Twitter. Unlike journalism on paper or digital, the distance between what is said and what is done via Twitter is enormous.
Does it dehumanize twitter ?: maybe yes. Debating, arguing and persuading is very complicated if not impossible via messages; Neither ten nor twenty nor a hundred words are enough to substantiate and argue. There are those who argue, with good reason, that its use or misuse alters the democracy. Quasi vivo example is Donald Trump: I would love to know, exactly, I am affected by a dose of morbidness, how many messages that president snapped via twitter. The answer is close to the next word: uncountable. The other answer, truthful, was accounted for The Washington Post, whose work, similar to the tenacity of the ants, identified 25,000 lies, 50 every day.
Immersed in Twitter worlds, Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin And those who I ignore, and worried about the deteriorated life of traditional newspapers, especially those made of paper, raised, I admit, by a dose of melancholy, it is worth reflecting on the pros and cons of the world of Twitter and the dangers involved to communicate by means of 140, 280 or perhaps, in the future, 560 characters, which, I don’t think will happen: stringing together sensible, logical ideas, with semicolons, without spelling errors is a lot to ask for most of those who live too long. time in the Twitter universe. Twitter is neither exhausted nor satiated. It gobbles, alienates and demands. Without Twitter, millions preach it, impossible to be.
Doctor and writer.
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