James Joyner voices concern that rapid-fire communication technologies (Twitter, et. al.) may be forcing snap-decisions on issues before those issues can be fairly and fully evaluated.
I share some of Joyner’s concern. Compelled to react to the Iranian situation over the weekend and yesterday, I authored what I think (in retrospect) were some remarkably thin, shallow, pedestrian posts.
What I did afterward, however, is what I think counts: I went back to those posts; revising, updating, correcting, and layering them with new information and insights. I won’t pretend those posts are now works of art; they are not. But at least they evolved as the situation evolved.
If every user of social media did the same — sharing progressive pieces of the puzzle that both support and contradict their initial impressions — it’s reasonable to assume we could collectively iterate our way to studied conclusions, much like those we’d reach if we delayed our reaction until we had read and absorbed as much information as we could.
Case in point: By reading and sharing news as it evolved, many of us reached the same conclusion about the likely fraud in the Iranian election as CNN’s experts’ assessment.
On our way to that conclusion, we considered Sexton’s analysis, the Ballen-Doherty counterargument, plus Cole’s and Silver’s responses. We also read reports that Ahmadinejad had not only not won the election, but had finished third. However, noting the major caveat on this information (“authenticity of the leaked figures could not be confirmed”), we tabled it and moved on to other slices of information.
You can see a similar process at work on Andrew Sullivan’s blog — where readers have been treated to a multi-day tour de force; an endless, iterative, weaving search for truth, sprinkled with caveats, which (as of yesterday) wound up in essentially the same endzone as many others: “the elections stripped Ahmadinejad of any legitimacy.”
Thus, when faulty conclusions are reached, I’m convinced they’re not necessarily the result of the technologies used to reach them, but the result of individuals who read only one article, one blog post, or a handful of “tweets,” make instant judgments, and then fail (or refuse) to go back to see if their initial judgments survived the test of the countless articles, posts, and tweets that followed.
In short: While I share Joyner’s concern about faulty, thoughtless conclusions, my concern is focused on an age-old failure of human nature, not technology. In fact, used properly and fairly, as Sullivan and others like him have used it — as an equitably wielded affirmer and corrector of first impressions — modern communications technology could very well be an antidote to the all-too-human tendency to stop thinking and accept pre-packaged reality.
The case of all cases in point: The millions of Iranians who used Twitter and other such technologies to continue thinking and communicating and organizing and challenging the reality that was pre-packaged for them.