This was a great discussion with @nxthompson, and I want to take some of what I said about Twitter to Twitter. So:
People keep saying Twitter isn’t real life. True enough. But it shapes real life. wired.com/story/why-are-…
People keep saying Twitter isn’t real life. True enough. But it shapes real life. wired.com/story/why-are-…
When people say Twitter is not real life, what they mean is it isn’t representative of mass opinion. But politics isn’t representative of mass opinion, either!
Political elites have an outsized effect on what actually happens in politics, and they’re constantly on Twitter, living in its controversies and resentments, and they (we!) create a politics that looks more like Twitter even if that’s not what the country wants.
And yes, political journalists are particularly bad offenders here. We give outsized attention to figures and controversies that dominate Twitter, and that makes those figures and controversies more politically important than they'd otherwise be.
This isn't new to Twitter, of course. You could've made — and can still make — the same points about cable news.
A big theme of my book is that as political elites polarize, and adopt more polarized strategies, they polarize the public not by changing the public's views, but by changing the choices people have to make.
Donald Trump can't win a primary a few decades back. It's because of cable news and Twitter that he could in 2016. And Trump is a very polarizing figure! Now the public has to choose which side of Trumpism they're on.
The debate about online Bernie supporters has this quality, too. It shapes how a lot of political elites feel about the primary, even though most voters will never come into contact with these Twitter fights. And then it has offline effects, like with the Culinary Union.
Tldr, Twitter isn't a neutral mirror of real life. But nor is politics!
