Ken has an intriguing post below exploring issues relating to technologies like Twitter and their impact upon communication competence and media ecology. While many of these technologies are here to stay, I think that we’re all going to see many of them peak soon. Just as the car gave us traffic jams, Twitter and Facebook are probably going to hit their points of maximum capacity in the not-too-distant future, given their rapid diffusion. Yet I’m also not that concerned, at least for now, about these technologies being “minimalist” forms of communication. As Kathleen Hall Jamieson argues, “I love you” is a sound bite. This isn’t to denigrate developed analysis; I’m a big fan of book-length manuscripts and all the fruits of the printing press. But we might need to move the discussion more to one of “meaning” rather than linear quantity, to better understand the limits and potentials of new forms of social media.

There may be one trend to celebrate for now. Twitter appears to be opening up a space for more direct democracy (or at least a strengthened representative democracy) between elected officials and their constituents (see “Twitter and its Impact on American Governance,” www.communicationcurrents.com/index.asp?bid=15&issuepage=157&False). There is some evidence that, despite the limits of the channel, it is being used by officials to bypass mainstream media filters and framings. If this development continues, we’re going to have to rethink entire theoretical edifices created in the last few decades (such as McCombs & Shaw’s “agenda-setting theory”—which describes how the media sets the public and political agenda).

 How this will all work out remains to be seen. I’d like to know how much of a one-way or two-way communication channel Twitter will likely become. Right now it seems more of a one-way blast of advocacy than a considered interaction. Or, more troublingly, perhaps the form of this technology will foster a new age of assertion, rather than argument. On the other hand, it’s now well-known that the move from typewriting to word processing freed us all up to “overwrite,” being less careful about sentence by sentence constructions or the constraints of white-out and laborious re-drafting. Maybe Twitter is a countertrend to these developments—forcing writers to work within a tightly bounded channel where communicative impact, rather than spewing, becomes more of a norm again.