Douglas Adams has written the perfect response to Brendan O’Neill’s cretinous Twitter article

Professional wind-up merchant Brendan O’Neill, of Spiked (something he describes as an ‘independent online phenomenon’, though everyone else would call it a ‘shit blog’) has written an attack on Twitter in the Daily Telegraph:

Twitterers’ supposed passion for freedom of speech quickly shrivels up and evaporates if anyone dares to say something that goes against liberal orthodoxies. That is because, for all the claims that Twitter is an un-policeable, almost anarchic space in which law fears to tread, in truth it has created its own hierarchy and its own forms of conformism… The general political outlook of influential Twitterers is summed up in the fact that 76.1% of tweets about the AV referendum were pro-AV (and only 23.9% were anti), compared with 67.9% of the electorate that firmly said no to AV.

The liberal consensus, and its corresponding intolerance of consensus-breakers, has been fairly successfully transported into Twitter, making this social networking site a surprisingly conformist and uncritical arena.

This is the kind of tedious linkbait that wouldn’t normally be worthy of response – except that he happened to write it on the 10th anniversary of of Douglas Adams’ death, and Adams’ 1999 essay How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Internet provides the perfect riposte. I’ve swapped the words ‘Internet’ and ‘web’ for ‘Twitter’, but everything else is Douglas Adams’ own:

Because Twitter is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish on Twitter, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on Twitter. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone.

Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on Twitter anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’

What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on Twitter on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from Twitter is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.

Brendan O’Neill: a man so ignorant about the web that he can be torn apart by a someone who died in the days of dial-up.