The Dangers of Twitter

Image by premasagar via Flickr

There are many different viewpoints on the importance of Twitter. Some people like twitter because it is convenient to access (from either a cell phone or computer) and because it is a good way to keep up with what friends are doing. Also, the speaker we had in class talked about its practical potential. If someone puts an update on Twitter about bad traffic, it can save us a lot of time, or if a friend tweets about a good sale, it would help both the company and the people who buy the products.

But there is another group of people, myself included, that are just asking “Who cares?” I think Twitter is interesting to check once in a while, but there isn’t really much motivation for me to keep checking the site just so I can see that one of my friends is “eating PB&J” or “doing homework.”

Other concerns about Twitter are the commonly-heard complaints that it is too brief, can be annoying if people update it too frequently, and has a tendency to exceed bandwidth (in which case the “fail whale” will appear).

But another concern with Twitter, to which I had never really given much thought, came up when I was reading an article on CNN.com called, “Scientists Warn of Twitter Dangers.” This article expressed some scientists’ beliefs that using social-networking devices such as Twitter are numbing our sense of morality. The argument is that Twitter is so brief and rapid, that it doesn’t give us time to fully experience the emotions that each post is trying to convey, and as a result, we are becoming more and more indifferent to human suffering.

I thought this was kind of interesting, because it is something that I never really would have thought about. What kind of impact this theory will have on the future use of Twitter, I don’t really know. But I think the chances of us slowing down at all for the sake of morality are pretty slim.