Emery C. Martin

I just read Clay Shirky’s essay/post, “The Failure of #amazonfail,” which discusses the failure of the twitter-activism of #amazonfail.  Rather interesting piece surrounding the whole amazon adult content tagging debacle.  However, what struck me was the potential that Twitter’s constrainted limited communication system could be designed perfectly for ill informed reactionary positions.  So, here are my quick reactionary thoughts in response to Shirky.  Also, more updates in general hopefully coming soon.

The specificity of this amazon instance aside I think one very interesting aspect of the essay is the potential embedded reactionary nature of things like Twitter and what it means for activism.  The framework of twitter is built to provide an outlet for instant communication to a large mass of people on any errant thought.  You have to do this in 140 characters or less so you are likely not going to be filling your tweet with every nuance or potential detail that maybe needed to really address the topic or thought at hand.  This framework can hence close down conversations that need to be had before we all begin pounding out another 140 characters on our keyboards of activism that will hopefully assail a stunning blow to the “them.”  So, is Twitter simply a tool for short sighted reactionary positions?  No not necessarily but it sure can be conducive to them.  Do we need to place warnings such as “Tweet Responsibly,” “Think Before You Tweet,” or maybe “Don’t Drink and Tweet.”  Not sure, but the idea that the designed limitations of a communication system can be directly conducive to uninformed reactionary thought is interesting to say the least.  At least to me that is.