The drift of twitter

When a massive tsunami was ravaging Japan last week, the third most popular twitter trend was Godzilla. It was trending because people,despite the huge tragedy, were making jokes about a Godzilla coming out of the Fukushima nuclear plant if there was a nuclear disaster. For a topic to trend on twitter, millions of its users have to use that hash-tag. On this particular instance they were divided between a majority who were making fun of the disaster and a minority who were condemning the jokes.
Since its inception in 2006, the microblogging site has achieved quite a lot. For one, it single handedly killed blogging as we knew it. People are no longer writing long passages about their opinions but are posting their thoughts in 140 characters. It grew into a global phenomenon after Facebook and at last count has 190 million users, half of them American and about 1% Indian. It is credited with toppling dictators, finding jobs, crowd sourcing, writing books,and at times like when Godzilla is trending , making you lose faith in humanity.
A 2009 survey by a market-research firm found that 40% of traffic on twitter is “pointless babble”. While I doubt this may have decreased over the period since the study, twitter has become more popular and is certainly spewing more junk than ever before. Charlie Sheen is a case in point. The highest paid TV star in America is obviously mentally sick and is in need of psychiatric help. He is addicted and lost his million dollar job due to his public antics. But within weeks of joining twitter he has amassed a following of two and half million users who were clearly laughing at his “tiger blood” tweets. A man who should have been sympathized with and who should have been sent to a rehab and a psychiatrist was enjoying enormous fame and was thinking all was good because of his followers who had no empathy for him and were only laughing at him.
What old timers call as lowering of standards, in education, and in ethics around the world combined with a very bad celebrity culture is leading this twitter revolution with trending topics like tiger blood and Godzilla. What is more alarming is what New York Times editor Bill Keller calls the "the American Idol-ization of news". When the editor of one of the most respected papers on the earth says "once-serious news outlets give pride of place not to stories they think important but to stories that are 'trending' on Twitter", it is time to take note.
This is much more evident and like everything else, much more chaotic and rabble rousing in India. Five years after its conception, the government and most of the political parties do not understand twitter. And if you take some time out to check various Indian twitter accounts randomly, you will realize one thing. Most of them are people who have never tweeted but are just following celebrities from Amitabh to Barkha Dutt, people (called trolls) who use twitter to spew venom at a caste,religion, person or region and who use it to abuse the so-called celebrities. Twitter would have gotten Binayak Sen out of jail in Egypt.
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