Rhetoric Revolutionized: How Twitter, Facebook, and Text Messaging Can Save Argument

<This guest post is contributed by Leslie Johnson, who writes about health, green living, and parenting at masters in health administration.>

   

the structural transformation of the public phereIt has been said time and time again: the internet has revolutionized the world in many ways.  The World Wide Web has unquestionably changed the way we live our lives, providing a means for instant information, endless conversation, and worthless entertainment.  While several aspects of our world have been altered by the internet, the way in which we communicate with one another is perhaps what has been the most altered.  With the advent of text messaging, Facebook, and Twitter comes a new discourse environment and a new rhetoric.  While critics endlessly condemn social media as a destructor of verbal language, when used to its fullest capacity social media has the potential to promote public discourse and constructive argument.

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The Grass Is Always Greener

I've written in defense of Facebook before, and Alexis Madrigal does it better than me:

...The real struggle is with ourselves to use Facebook well … You get to determine your level of investment in the digital world around you. You get to choose the people you listen and talk to. You have control over your data. You get to define who you are, no matter what your Facebook profile says. All that is not lost unless we choose to lose it.

I think this is obvious, and if you don't get it, may nature select against your genes.  The one concern I do have with Facebook is that it is so much better than anything else at allowing users to use their own local knowledge to coordinate and manage information that it will soon come to monopolize much of the activity on the Internet (just like Microsoft with the operating system market in the 1990s) - future blogging will be solely on Facebook, email will be taken over by Facebook (perhaps as soon as tomorrow), games developed will be all for Facebook platforms a la Farmville; essentially, we could be seeing the genesis of something far more of a monopoly in any meaningful sense of the word than Microsoft ever was

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Stop Ranting about Facebook Privacy Settings

Derek Thompson of The Atlantic recently posted an article, "Facebook Does Not Understand the Meaning of Privacy" as a response to recent comments made by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg vis-a-vis speculation that the company is selling user information to advertisers.  From Zuckerberg:

In the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information (sic). People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that's evolved over time.

The Atlantic rightly points out that Facebook updates, including the "news feed" section, were initially unpopular with its base of elitist Ivy League students trying to show-off for their selective group of peers.

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