As many of you may be aware, Australia’s leading left-leaning blog, Larvatus Prodeo, is closing down. Its last post went up today (I think, remember I’m in the UK and so should allow for time differences).
Leaving everything else aside, Mark made the following observation:
There’s no longer the same need for a hub for political discussion, as lively debate has migrated to social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, and as the space for opinion and analysis around the shop has widened. The fact that the ‘blogosphere’ in Australia is no longer a term that makes much sense is an indicator of that change.
The reason I’ve quoted this passage is that I think he’s wrong. I think Twitter is a terrible platform for political debate; it encourages the worst sort of sound-bite approach to complex issues; the only use for Twitter seems to be (a) the conspicuous display of wit (which one of my lecturers at Edinburgh, Alexander McCall Smith, does amazingly well) and (b) the embodiment of Cameron’s First Law. There is no middle ground. And if a tweet is ‘heavyweight’ or thought-provoking, it’s because it links to an article somewhere that addresses the issue in greater depth.
Then there’s facebook, which as my friends know is a repository (at least in my case) for cat humour, funny dog pictures (mainly from Dogs for the Disabled) and my endless complaints about HMRC (when I’m finished this tax seat I plan to burn my Tolley’s statutes, all five volumes of them, 3000+ pages each, printed on Bible paper). The idea that facebook is a good place for political debate strikes me as ‘not even wrong’.
However, this is something about which I am likely to be ‘not even wrong’. As anyone who also knows me knows, I am beyond technically incompetent. I am one of those people who would be quite happy if every computer on the planet blew up tomorrow: I’m fine with card catalogues, typewriters (which I can take apart and fix) cars with carburetters (ditto) and using, you know, paper law reports. I’ve even memorized much of the Library of Congress cataloguing system.
Which means I am temperamentally out of sympathy with ‘social media’ and ‘social media developments’, and am likely missing something.
So: what am I missing? I’d really like to know. Is there some corner of twitter and facebook that does something other than what I’ve outlined above?
UPDATE: Over at his place, Tim Train makes an excellent point about how a good piece of writing (Will Zeng’s comment on nearly clouting Trenton Oldfield in the head with his oar, see my earlier post) was very nearly destroyed simply because it was published on Twitter. Some kind soul at the OUBC had sorted it out by the time it got to me; Tim shows you what the original looked like.
UPDATE II: Jim Belshaw makes some related points about the growing mountain of sh*t (he uses a politer word) one has to wade through when panning for internet gold.
