Trouble with Twitter

The animated short "Trouble with Twitter" was an immensely popular preview for the show SuperNews!, a sketch comedy on Current TV. The short was very critical of the social media phenomenon, but are the complaints merited?

The cartoon short begins with two hip young technology professionals in their cubicles, one of whom is loudly proclaiming his current actions such as "I'M SITTING DOWN NOW!" His friend is somewhat annoyed by the shouting, and asks what is going on, at which point both are whisked up into the "twittersphere."

There the ignorant friend learns that twittering is basically people saying mundane things about their uninteresting lives in order to feel connected. The young man questions the validity of this, even of the "twitterlebrities" (caricatures of Warren Ellis and Guy Kawasaki are featured) and suggests that none of the twitterers actually have any friends.

While his companion complains that he doesn't "twitterstand", the damage is done – the twitter icon turns from a happy little bluejay into a vengeful bird of prey, which is then zapped by the "Fail Whale" that turns the twittersphere dark and menacing. As the great white leviathan gobbles up the twitterers, the two men realize they've broken twitter, and marooned all of the users in a sea of irrelevance.

Falling down from the twittersphere, they find themselves back in their cubicle, injured but alive – and one of them immediately tries to twitter about the experience.

The video brings up a lot of questions about the "microblogging" social media platform that is twitter. The biggest criticism seems to be that the people who twitter are saying nothing of importance, and that there is a vast sea of irrelevance among all the twitter feeds.

"Trouble With Twitter" ignores a few significant phenomena.

• When an airplane crash-landed in the Hudson River in 2009, the first successful water landing of its kind with no casualties, the first news and pictures of the event were sent via a twitter post by a man on the ferry sent to rescue passengers.
• When terrorists were bombing Mumbai, they used twitter to coordinate their movements – and the police later used twitter to help track and stop the attacks.
• News of the protests of the Iranian election in 2009 were severely censored by government there – and twitter became a news outlet that the government was unable to suppress, especially when the "twittersphere" began confusing the censors by changing their timestamps to reflect Tehran time. This was a grass-roots movement in support of the demonstrators.

These major events are only a drop in the bucket – there have been many political, business, and social upheavals made through twitter. This makes the social networking site seem a bit more than just people randomly shouting "I'M HAVING TWO SUGARS IN MY COFFEE NOW" or automatic advertising.

It's especially strange that the short would criticize one aspect of social media while at the same time making use of another – namely, YouTube. At one point the skeptical friend asks, "If these people really cared, wouldn't they actually call you and talk to you?" It's pretty easy to imagine the same situation in 1995, in regard to cell phones: "If these people really cared, wouldn't they actually come over instead of calling?" Or "…wouldn't they actually write a letter instead of emailing?"

While the social philosophy of "Trouble with Twitter" may be as old as Luddites, it is also unarguably entertaining and popular. At the very least it makes the viewers who do twitter question their "tweets" and wonder whether they are actually useful or relevant. Most "twitterlebrities" (or, perhaps a better term would be "twitterati") are popular because they provide either useful information, entertaining commentary, or both; emulating those skills and putting them out for the world can enrich the world of social media byte by byte and tweet by tweet.

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