After reading this article in Slate musing on why more Congressmen don’t use Twitter, I have to say that there are few things I would be less interested in reading half a dozen times a day than 140 characters worth of the fleeting thoughts of the members of the House of Representatives  or the arguably slightly saner people in the Senate.  Perhaps I’m unduly cynical, but I generally feel that a certain amount of filtering on political news is necessary to keep the battier stuff from driving you crazy.  Important points, please, not the latest on the Senator who sneezed while the leader of the opposition was making a key speech on the floor.  (The scandal!)

Twitter itself is designed to be the perfect medium for conveying the trivial.  There are people who can be poetic, meaningful in 140 characters, but not many.  I’d like to imagine that our legislators are better than the average person at this kind of thing, but frankly, we didn’t pick them for their concise force of expression, and it’s questionable whether we even picked them for their intelligence.  Do I care that Pete Hoekstra is having dinner in Grand Rapids today?  Uh, no.

Count me as another supporter for the continued existence of traditional media.  If someone is going to have to sort through that crap, by all means let it not be me.

Tags: Congress, Slate, Twitter

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 5th, 2009 at 1:55 pm and is filed under Nailing Palin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.