"First, Twitter is not and cannot be “free speech.” .... quite literally, does not support a leisurely and unfettered exchange of ideas, as one would expect of a long-form, in-person conversation."
Within my denomination, many "very-online" users of Twitter and Facebook to advocate polemical positions like the analogy between the technological developments which catalyzed the Reformation and the use of social media in our present age: as Gutenberg was for Luther, so goes the analogy, Zuckerberg and Dorsey have done for "our" reformation protests. Your blog post today helped me think about that (even as "freedom from and freedom for" is also an important dialectic for Luther on freedom).
The way I've tended to think about it, and your observation about the intrinsically limited speech of Twitter to its 24 characters, is that social media has also "commodified" freedom so that every tweet, post, etc. is itself the imprint of the business model that monetizes the algorithm. And once you've got that perspective clear, then the dialectical tension is the relationship between commodity and, as you've put in your post, the building of character and community. Thanks again.
Sharp analysis here, thanks much.
"First, Twitter is not and cannot be “free speech.” .... quite literally, does not support a leisurely and unfettered exchange of ideas, as one would expect of a long-form, in-person conversation."
Within my denomination, many "very-online" users of Twitter and Facebook to advocate polemical positions like the analogy between the technological developments which catalyzed the Reformation and the use of social media in our present age: as Gutenberg was for Luther, so goes the analogy, Zuckerberg and Dorsey have done for "our" reformation protests. Your blog post today helped me think about that (even as "freedom from and freedom for" is also an important dialectic for Luther on freedom).
The way I've tended to think about it, and your observation about the intrinsically limited speech of Twitter to its 24 characters, is that social media has also "commodified" freedom so that every tweet, post, etc. is itself the imprint of the business model that monetizes the algorithm. And once you've got that perspective clear, then the dialectical tension is the relationship between commodity and, as you've put in your post, the building of character and community. Thanks again.