Planning My Post: Is Twitter Destroying Us?

Blue Twitter Logo

Reflecting on my last blog posts and on the way my perspective has changed through my experiences and the different readings I have spent time with, I have come to the conclusion to pick a narrower and therefore, more controversial topic rather than Freedom

of Speech rather, our modern public sphere: Twitter. It may be understood that Twitter is a place where people can post whatever they want whenever they want making it a much larger scale public sphere than what they had in the Enlightenment period. This is relevant because we live in the digital age.With that comes an easiness to life that people before us did not know, but it also brings up a new set of problems. We can say whatever we want, but where is the line drawn?

History Component

For this next blog post, I plan on connecting Twitter to the public sphere learned about in the Enlightenment period in our history. The public sphere was a place where people gathered together to discuss, this would happen in most often Coffee Shops and I'd imagine that the way that it would happen was much like a discussion you might have in a classroom, but maybe with the casualness of a Coffee Shop. Back then, it was what made up a good democracy and made the government ideal. It was where people could communicate points of view, opinions and address their concerns. 

Rhetoric Component

In our quest as humans to find truth and to create a society that is beneficial to the society as a whole, we must reevaluate the way we are communicating with each other and in order to do this, we must reevaluate what we are posting on social media platforms such as twitter. 

Lately, there has been a lot of examples of misuse of twitter such as posting lies about crimes that have occurred. These posts have reached the police and once the police get there, they find that it was a false alarm. How are we supposed to regulate that? We are going back to the boy that cried wolf story. What happens when there is actually a serious situation going on? There is no time to second guess a cry for help or a police report.

Personal Component

I myself do not spend time on Twitter, but my roommate is very active on the twitter sphere. I hear often about the trends of discussion on the platform. This is the way I keep up with it. Even though I do not spend a whole lot of time on twitter, I do know what it is like to live in this digital age. Reading the rules on content for twitter were comforting, but I think that there should be more rules on what you can post. You cannot post anything of the graphic nature on there.

Being an author and photographer, I deal with these issues of publication and posting just about every day. There are plenty of ways to misuse media, but I think in the end, it is up to us to post things that can help others rather than the opposite. Posting truth instead of lies.