Toxic Twitter Promotes The Future Moron
Speed kills. This week the velocity of the news agenda has been shaped by various narratives driven by the telegraph wire of Twitter. From Logan Paul to Toby Young, the week’s anguish proves that it’s a deafening noise that drowns out something more profound and enlightened, ideas and insight. Each incident provoked angst, each instance echoed the diverse passions of the Twitterati; a mutant debate without form or substance. Mere grunts and reflected deliberations of opprobrium. Meanwhile, we learn little from this tumult and roar. Of course, the crowd must speak its mind openly and debate disagreements honestly, but Twitter is not a fit medium for this purpose. It is descending into a device platforming grandiose craving for admiration.
To quote Kurt Cobain “I don’t care what you think unless it is about me.”
Having a point of view is different from always being correct. No one is always right, unless you are a self-styled opinion former, a puny microblogging non-entity. The constraints of the Twitter word-count shackles, conditioning a climate for the future moron. To be objective, to use one’s reason, is possible only if one has achieved an attitude of humility. The channel does not allow this though so we consume daily junk knowledge and pseudo-events.
Gone is the setting for fostering meaningful mediation especially whilst society is shaped by enormous issues of social change. Twitter is the space we experience the ethics of defective values. Twitter is breeding out trusted sources and meaningful opinion. The endangered element is the lack of time and space for wise discourse. It’s a channel which could move and inspire people with innovative ideas; instead its brevity is corroding the daily polemic. The channel has lowered the bar for those who want to be known, whilst extinguishing those who might make a difference. Giant intellects do not have the opportunity to be heard, drowned out by the guttural spot news moment. We accept the age of the moment, the currency of the soundbite. Effluent drains through these social sewers. Twitter circulates a stench worse than the medieval streets of London. Commentators and influencers who harvest the platform are becoming obsessed with ill-informed babble of the new age notables. A crowd of over opinionated throng reducing legitimate debate to feral doggerel.
Sometime soon we must place humanity before the daily demands of tech clickbait and begin to open proper discourse on the issues that are shaping a confused and disrupted world. For good ideas and true innovation, there is a need for human interaction, conflict, argument, debate, not smartarse comment to attract more retweets. The future is in desperate need of leaders to decode a baying mob now vulnerable to the charms of a charismatic demagogue. There is not time to look back and remember those who touched our human feelings. We need time to forge raw material, the vital element for renewed growth. Let us demand the soul of brilliant debate and true leadership.