Is there still a point to having discussions on Twitter?

It’s been a banner week for Twitter, hasn’t it? Not only did Twitter’s user-generated reporting of the unrest in Iran over the weekend manage to outclass the comparatively weak coverage provided by the television networks, it turns out Twitter is playing an even more important role in that unrest. While most of the public internet in Iran has been shut down, protesters are finding ways to communicate with each other over Twitter in a manner that’s so vital that yesterday the U.S. State Department asked Twitter to move its planned hour of late-night maintenance to the middle of the day, which is the middle of the night in Iran, so that the protesters wouldn’t be hurt by being without it. So if Twitter has now become such an important tool for the world at large, how is it that using Twitter has suddenly become one of the least enjoyable parts of my day?

I’ve long felt that the real value of Twitter isn’t so much in the ability to read what other people post as it is the opportunity to respond to what others are saying in real time and generate an instant dialog that potentially leaves both sides enlightened. And in the two years I’ve been using Twitter on a daily basis, it’s generally played out that way. In fact, when I’m having a busy day and don’t have time to read everything that’s posted by the people I follow, I make a point of at least keeping my eyes on the replies tab so that I get to read any responses that are directed at me, allowing me to reply back to them as appropriate. But too often lately those exchanges, which have in the past tended to be productive or at least thought provoking, have instead devolved into exchanges that are pointless at best and in some instances injurious.

I thought maybe it was just me. Perhaps I’d drifted off onto a hostile streak without being aware of it. But I’ve looked around, asked around, and it turns out I’m far from the only one who’s reached the same conclusion: exchanges that were once civil and productive are now often counterproductive. I’m not sure it makes me feel any better to think that the problem might be endemic and not just local. In any case, after several days in a row in which I felt my time spent on Twitter had been more waste than worth, it finally came to a head today when I realized I was embroiled too many different simultaneous exchanges to count, most of which had no point, several of which were too heated, and some of which didn’t even make any sense. Frustrated, I posted the message “I wonder if we’re wasting our time on here, too difficult to open others’ eyes to your points of view in 140-character doses,” and then I got up and walked away from the computer and haven’t so much as looked at Twitter since.

No, I’m not done using Twitter. But something has gone off the rails. During my time on Twitter I’ve witnessed a number of evolutionary aspects, and as intrigued as I’ve been at people’s willingness to publicly post details about their lives that they would have previously kept private, I’ve been even more fascinated at their willingness to have conversations in public that would in the past nearly always have taken place in private. In the early days of this trend, those conversations were civil, restrained, often carefully metered by an awareness on the part of the participants that the world was potentially listening in. More recently though, those participants, myself included, seem to have collectively grown less concerned about which third parties might overhear what, or even which third parties might attempt to jump into the fray.

I’m often tempted to pin it on the election, which was the Twitter’s first real opportunity for divisiveness. People you respected overall turned out to have political views which while you respected their right to have and express those views, you couldn’t necessarily respect them for having those views. Still, things seemed to stay remarkably civil across the board throughout the electoral process, perhaps if only because those who disagreed with each other on the most fundamental levels knew better than to even attempt to debate each other.

Jump ahead eight months to the present, however, and the landscape on Twitter appears remarkably different. Post an opinion of any kind, and you’ll receive knee-jerk responses across the board. Which isn’t necessarily the end of the world, except that a good proportion of those responses are tangential to what you’ve posted at best. Even when a productive debate does start up, a third party can come along and break it up by confusing the issue. Find yourself in the middle of a healthy debate with someone over whether Palin’s response to Letterman was intentionally libelous, and someone else comes along and wants the debate to instead be about the appropriateness of Letterman’s joke.

Or for something far more controversial than politics, just try discussing technology. State that you’re glad AT&T finally gave some ground on its previous attempt to charge some people twice what the iPhone is supposed to cost, and you’ll get barraged by people throwing around the word “subsidy” who think they know more about the issue than you do. If someone is so naive that they aren’t aware that “subsidized pricing” is nothing more than the carriers making up imaginary “unsubsidized” pricing in the hopes of suckering you into feeling good about paying a price that’s still outrageous but lower than the imaginary “full price” they’ve invented, then I’m happy to explain that to them. But I’m not about to waste my time trying to have that conversation with someone who has encountered AT&T’s party line about subsidized pricing, swallowed it whole, and thinks they’re more knowledgeable on the subject than anyone else because they can recite the party line by memory. Turns out they’re far bigger suckers than those who have no knowledge of cellphone pricing at all, but just try explaining that to them; they’re too busy running around misguidedly throwing around words like “subsidized” in the false belief that they’re impressing you with their inside knowledge.

Actually, it’s not impossible. While there are few things more difficult to swallow than being told that what you thought you knew is so invalid that it’s left you less able to understand a certain situation than someone who knows nothing at all about it, coming to that difficult realization can be of great benefit to you. The problem is that you’re not going to be particularly thrilled with the person who’s trying to convince you of this, particularly not while the light bulb is still coming on over your head, and perhaps not even after the fact, as no one likes to feel embarrassed. So it’s the kind of conversation you only enter into with great caution, usually if the person is a close enough friend that they can forgive you for the embarrassment you’re bringing them, and it’s certainly not a conversation you’d have with that friend in public.

Now imagine trying to have that kind of delicate conversation while being limited to a hundred and forty characters at a time, with people you probably think you know a little better than you really do, in a format in which conversations not only generally take place in public, but are prone to being hijacked by others. In trying to squeeze your thoughts into a series of twenty-word mini-manifestos, there is no room for the kind of platitudes that can soften otherwise divisive exchanges, no room for the kind of nuance that can keep those with differing viewpoints open minded to other possibilities. There’s room for your point, nothing but your point, and most definitely not your whole point, which can give the entire debate the feeling of a shouting match whether any of the participants are actually shouting or not. Compare this to a phone conversation, where the point of contention is usually the third item you discuss, or even an email in which you at least have room to open your statement by saying hello and close it by saying thanks.

Debates on Twitter really go haywire, though, when several people get in on the same discussion at once. Every large scale group discussion inevitably includes three groups of people: the ones who are knowledgeable, the ones who aren’t, and the ones who only think they are. The first group can help educate the second, and can even help re-educate the third, but not both at the same time in the same conversation. But try keeping those two conversations separate on Twitter. And the biggest obstacle, of course, is that everyone in the third group thinks they’re in the first, so you end up with the first and third groups arguing over what the facts of the matter really are, which merely manages to confuse the second group or turn them away out of disgust. Again, these issues are by no mean specific to Twitter and can be routinely encountered at any real-life cocktail party. But try having one of these tri-group conversations in 140 character doses, and it’ll stand even less chance of being productive than it would in the real world.

That’s to say nothing of the doomsday scenario in which you realize you’re engaged in debate with someone has such a (from your standpoint) warped view of the world that you’re best off not engaging them at all on any related topics. If someone believes large corporations should be allowed to get away with anything they want and that the individual victims of those corporations are at fault for being weak in the first place, then that belief is going to find its way into that person’s opinion on just about any issue of substance, which means there’s no point in me even trying to have a substantial conversation of any kind with that person. If you spent all of Star Wars rooting for Darth Vader then that’s your prerogative, but there’s no point in me trying to have a conversation with you about health care or even cellphone pricing. Not because I don’t want to hear what you have to say, and I want to be as clear about this as possible, but simply because there’s nothing productive that I can say in response. It helps to understand the viewpoints of those whose core beliefs you can’t fathom, but attempting to debate them on those viewpoints isn’t going to change your mind or theirs.

In elections we have just such debates between candidates, but those debates are for the benefit of the viewers who are trying to ascertain which of the two participants is on more solid ground. Rare is the public debate between politicians in which the two are genuinely trying to change each other’s mind or sell each other on their viewpoints; most often they’re each merely trying to sell the audience on their viewpoint in the hopes of defeating the person they’re debating. And I can’t help but wonder if that’s what’s gone wrong with discussions on Twitter as well. Too rarely these days do we see debates and discussions on Twitter in which we’re genuinely trying to convince the other person to see it our way. Instead, lured by the presence of an audience and the desire to win them over, we attempt to convince the audience that the person we’re debating is full of it. And if you think those kind of audience-oriented debates are insufficiently nuanced or civil in the real world, just try having those debates in a format that severely limits the potential for nuance or civility.

I don’t know what the answer is. I do know that I’m at a crossroads as far as how I use Twitter each day. That’s not necessarily as surprise, as it’s a platform that comes with no instruction manual and was originally invented for nothing more than small scale private conversations among a handful of coworkers. But at a time the platform is evolving into something so meaningful as to directly influence major events around the world, I now have to step back and figure out how to once again make it meaningful to me. I used to think that the way to make Twitter work for me was to respond every time someone said something that I had a viewpoint on, and to put extra emphasis on responding back to those who responded to me. But perhaps I’ve taken that philosophy too far, or maybe it’s just not as valid as it used to be, with thousands of people now in my Twitter network and most of us now caring so much less about what we say in public than we used to. Maybe I should just read what others are saying without replying myself, and say what’s on my mind without reading the replies that others feel the need to throw back at me. That’s not what I’ve ever thought Twitter was about. But as with all things that evolve, maybe those days are over.

I’ll be severely disappointed if anyone tries to hijack the comments section by opining on the real-world topics I’ve arbitrarily used in this article as mere examples of hot button issues (and in fact I’ll take the step, rare for me, of deleting any such attempts). But I’m interested in discussion of whether you’ve seen the same trends play out in your Twitter sphere, whether you’re finding it harder to maintain productive discussion or civil debate in amongst the fray, and how you’re (or how we all should be) dealing with it. I’m open to ideas. And of course there’s no 140-character limitation here.