I missed Obama's Twitter Town Hall last week - the first ever held. I actually love Twitter, but I like my discussions about substantive policy issues done in complete sentences.
While Twitter's immediacy and randomness make for a perfect communication medium in our world right now, it also shines a bright light on our inability as citizens to roll up our sleeves and work really hard on things like policy. Politics just doesn't lend itself to quick keystrokes.
In this wired world of instant gratification, we want what we want when we want it. We’ve got fast food, automatic teller machines, instant messaging, on-demand movies, GPS, express mail, jiffy lube, speed dial, an app for everything and a million other conveniences to satisfy our desires and whims.
But our ability to communicate faster and with more people at the same time will never be a substitute for problem solving and work. I'm beginning to doubt that we have the patience and perseverence we need to solve the complex issues we're entrenched in right now.
With the debt ceiling crisis looming over our heads as a nation, a flailing economy and millions out of work, the time for blame is over. It's frustrating watching our leaders sit around a table being inflexible and unimaginative. They need to work on the problems and find solutions.
Thanks to some outlandish statements by GOP candidate Michelle Bachmann recently about John Quincy Adams, I went back for a historical refresher course and became intriuged by some things I had forgotten about his father, John Adams.
After the trying times of separation and revolution of which he was such an integral part, Adams served in a diplomatic capacity in Europe away from his family, his native state of Massachusetts, and his newly born country for 11 long years. He nearly died during a bout of consumption in the Netherlands, struggled with loneliness and alienation in Britain, and worked tirelessly on difficult treaties in Paris while desperately longing for his home, family, and beloved wife. But he stayed and persevered. When he finally returned in 1788, his children were fully grown adults, barely recognizable to him as he made his way off the ship. That's commitment.
The Twitter Town Hall was a perfect example of how far we strayed from knowing what true patience and hard work are when it comes to finding solutions to the complex problems in our world. And while I will always applaud government's efforts at improving public outreach and simplifying communication with citizens, I have intense doubts about our ability as leaders and citizens to participate effectively in our democracy.
Are we willing to substitute quick fixes and instant gratification in order to make the sacrifices and well thought out decisions we need to create a better, more equitable country for all?
Twitter certainly isn't the answer. What's more - it just may have been the most effective method of extracting a viable presidential campaign fundraising database ever executed. Twitter time is over. Now get back to work!
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Mark Ira Kaufman
Erica K
Brassawe
scupper
Emily Holleman
Lyn LeJeune
Salon.com
Comments
Using twitter and facebook as a "tool" for organizing and networking is different, though. You can use facebook and twitter to organize a high brow public speaking and debate event, featuring high level discussion, dialogue and fancy beer.
8)
In a sense, twitter can never replace the beer hall or town square, but it can bring the rabble there...
And, according to the "pundits" I was listening to on NPR, the "twitter feed" got stacked by Republicans who were trying to espouse an agenda and the "algorithms" of Twitter got overwhelmed.
More particularly, rather it's Twitter or texting or whatever the "next great thing" is, we have sacrificed qualitative communication to the altar of quantitative communication. But, this has been going on ever since the invention of the telegraph and later the telephone. At what point did the equilibrium between qualitative and quantitative fail?
Efficient communications, like twitter, can hinder the nuanced plasticity of in-depth personal discussions.
All too obviously, Bachmann has never been exposed to that level of literacy, or she might understand that John Q was not quite the saint she imagines, particularly when it came to the Indian holocaust. Witness this quote from him, using flowery language to wretched excess, in a pathetic attempt to justify theft and genocide:
"...moralists who have questioned the right of Europeans to intrude upon the possessions of the aborigines in any case and under any limitations whatsoever. But have they maturely considered the whole subject? The Indian right of possession itself stands, with regard to the greatest part of the country, upon a questionable foundation. Their cultivated fields, their constructed habitations, a space of ample sufficiency for their subsistence, and whatever they had annexed to themselves by personal labor, was undoubtedly by the law of nature theirs. But what is the right of the huntsman to the forest of a thousand miles over which he has accidentally ranged in quest of prey? Shall the liberal bounties of Providence to the race of man be monopolized by one of ten thousand for whom they were created? Shall the exuberant bosom of the common mother, amply adequate to the nourishment of millions, be claimed exclusively by a few hundreds of her offspring? Shall the lordly savage not only disdain the virtues and enjoyments of civilization himself, but shall he control the civilization of a world? Shall he forbid the wilderness to blossom like the rose? Shall he forbid the oaks of the forest to fall before the ax of industry and rise again transformed into the habitations of ease and elegance? Shall he doom an immense region of the globe to perpetual desolation, and to hear the howlings of the tiger and the wolf silence forever the voice of human gladness? Shall the fields and the valleys which a beneficent God has framed to teem with the life of innumerable multitudes be condemned to everlasting barrenness? Shall the mighty rivers, poured out by the hands of nature as channels of communication between numerous nations, roll their waters in sullen silence and eternal solitude to the deep? Have hundreds of commodious harbors, a thousand leagues of coast, and a boundless ocean been spread in the front of this land, and shall every purpose of utility to which they could apply be prohibited by the tenant of the woods? No, generous philanthropists! Heaven has not been thus inconsistent in the works of its hands. Heaven has not thus placed at irreconcilable strife its moral laws with its physical creation. "