Counterpoint: Politicians should stick to C-SPAN

From its creation to its use, Twitter is the scourge of the modern world. Apart from being a colossal waste of everyone's time, it makes good things bad and bad things worse.

After MySpace's blurbs and Facebook's status updates, it was hard to imagine that the self-promotion trend could get any more vapid. Unfortunately, Twitter has proven me wrong.

In theory, Twitter can potentially be used for some good. In practice, though, it falls short.

The thought of getting instant news updates is a sound one. There's nothing wrong with wanting to stay up to date on world events. But instead of using Twitter to give quick, up-to-the-minute news blurbs, the major news organizations have all taken to using the service to simply promote their own websites and TV shows.

It provides absolutely nothing that simply going to a news site once or twice a day couldn't accomplish. When it comes to getting news, Twitter is just an unnecessary middleman.

In a political climate that favors quick sound bites over reasoned, well-thought-out arguments, Twitter seems tailor-made for this purpose. But the few politicians who don't use the site just to post links to speeches seem to be interested in making petty arguments and snarky remarks about their political opponents.

Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin seems to enjoy this quite a bit. Shocking, I know. Her bizarre tweet "Who hijacked term: ‘feminist'? A cackle [sic] of rads who want 2 crucify other women w/whom they disagree on a singular issue; it's ironic (& passé)" is a perfect example of a quick, baseless attack. Boiling down an argument to 140 characters or less only further degrades the political process. Why waste your time preaching to the choir?

Twitter might be a fun place to make silly jokes, but it isn't a good forum for serious discussion. News and politics get boiled down too much to be effective. Self-promotion and sensationalism dominate the web site.

Thankfully, not all politicians have given in to Twitter. In the wise words of stand-up comic Lewis Black, "If you're Twittering, fuck you." I couldn't have said it better myself.