Don't press send: why restraint is a fine old virtue for a tweeting world

Don't press send: why restraint is a fine old virtue for a tweeting world
In the wake of the Petraeus and Newsnight scandals, it's time for society to reconsider its addiction to instant publicity
Restraint, a fine old virtue for a tweeting world | Henry Porter | Comment is free | The Observer

This week might be looked back upon as another milestone in the role of social media in the modern world. In this case, the same mechanism that exposed truths that old media laws had unfairly kept secret (twitter at its best), this time propelled falsehoods with the same power (wrongly naming a Tory peer as the officially unnamed figure in a child abuse scandal). The problem wasn't even that the sources weren't credible, since guardian journalist George Monbiot appears to have been one.

Without going into a detailed argument here about whether twitter is in net a good thing, I think the following points need to be considered in any such debate.
Firstly twitter's power is because it taps into a basic human drive -to talk about each other. It is new in terms of speed and reach, but not in terms of kind. This also means if it didn't exist, some thing similar soon would. For me the point then is not whether it in itself is something which can be good or bad, this difference still rests on us and how we use it. What is needed is a learning, or even an education, on how to handle it, both by those who transmit, to  understand the consequences (may feel like making a comment down the  pub to friends, but isn't), and those who receive, to recognize the same weaknesses and biases that underlie all human communication (ie seem like news, but also a like hearing something in the pub).

Overall I'm optimistic however, since even though it runs on one of the worst mechanisms known to man, human social behavior, it also incorporates one of the best, a self correcting feedback mechanism. The first is a weakness compared to old style media (in theory, though it is itself less immune to bias and fad than is often presumed) but the second is a great advantage, hopefully errors and lies can be savaged and drowned out in a "marketplace of ideas", which is I believe ultimately, like democracy, the best of a bad lot, and better than relying on supposedly benign and reliable authorities which are often hard to influence or bring to account. If you trust humanity overall (and all is in vain if you don't), then the good should out sing the bad, in the cacophony of the tweeted chorus...I hope!