“Bad uses of Twitter, as Margaret Atwood says, have been the fault of the user, not the technology. Comparing tweets with the telegram and African tribal drums, she argues in a 2010 Big Think interview that the form is “not different in nature from what we have always done, which is communicate with one another, send messages to one another and perform our lives.” Williams and Stone always conceived of Twitter as “a mouthpiece for everyday people,” and that’s what it’s been. Yet the uncertainty surrounding its purposes starts to seem more alarming as ownership, control and privacy become increasingly murky. The danger of the technology is not that it will make us more facile or less intelligent but that we can’t predict who, ultimately, will be running it – or to what ends.”
shaun james bockert 