Why Trump Tweets (And Why We Listen) by Nicholas Carr

Once again, an interesting opinion from Nicholas Carr into our current political state and its relationship to modern technology.

Twitter’s formal qualities as an informational medium—its immediacy and ephemerality, its vast reach, its lack of filters—mirror and reinforce the impulsiveness, solipsism, and grandiosity that define Trump’s personality and presidency and, by extension, the times. Banal yet mesmerizing, the president’s Twitter stream distills our strange cultural moment—the moment the noise became the signal.

Gambling and social media:

A similarly seductive dynamic [to gambling] plays out on the screens of social media apps. Because tweets and other posts also offer unpredictable rewards—some messages go viral, others fall flat—they exert the same kind of pull on the mind. “You never know if your next post will be the one that delivers a jackpot.”

And how that relates to Trump:

Trump’s tweets don’t just amass thousands of likes and retweets. They appear, sometimes within minutes of being posted, in high-definition blowups on "Fox & Friends" and "Morning Joe" and "Good Morning America." They’re read, verbatim, by TV and radio anchors. They’re embedded in stories in newspapers and on news sites, complete with Trump’s brooding profile picture. They’re praised, attacked and parsed by Washington’s myriad talking heads. When Trump tweets—often while literally watching the TV network that will cover the tweet—the jackpot of attention is almost guaranteed. Trump, by all accounts, spends an inordinate amount of time monitoring the media, the outsized coverage becomes all the more magnified in his mind. And as the signals flow back to him from the press, he is able to fine-tune his tweets to sustain or amplify the coverage. For Trump, in other words, tweeting isn’t just a game of chance. It’s a tool of manipulation. Twitter controls Trump, but Trump also controls Twitter—and, in turn, the national conversation.

On the nature of the medium that is Twitter:

With its emphasis on brief messages and reflexive responses, Twitter is a medium that encourages and rewards [a] reductive view of the world...it’s an invitation to shallowness.

And what that leads to:

Twitter relieves the president [and many of its users] of the pressure to be well-informed or discerning, even when he’s addressing enormously complicated issues like the North Korean nuclear threat...Twitter gives Trump [and again its users] license to sidestep rational analysis.

More acutely:

We listen so intently to Trump’s tweets because they tell us what we want to hear about the political brand we’ve chosen. In a perverse way, they serve as the rallying cries of two opposed and warring tribes...[Trump] succeeds in pulling the national conversation down to his own level—and keeping it there.

On a more philosophical level:

Thanks to the rise of networks like Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat, the way we express ourselves, as individuals and as citizens, is in a state of upheaval, an upheaval that extends from the family dinner table to the upper reaches of government. Radically biased toward space and against time, social media is inherently destabilizing. What it teaches us, through its whirlwind of fleeting messages, is that nothing lasts. Everything is disposable. Novelty rules. The sense that “nothing matters,” that wry, despairing complaint of people worried about national politics right now, isn’t just a Trump phenomenon; it’s built into the medium.