The age of Twitter: Donald J. Trump and the politics of debasement

ABSTRACT

This essay explores the changing character of public discourse in the Age of Twitter. Adopting the perspective of media ecology, the essay highlights how Twitter privileges discourse that is simple, impulsive, and uncivil. This effect is demonstrated through a case study of Donald J. Trump's Twitter feed. The essay concludes with a brief reflection on the end times: a post-truth, post-news, President Trump, Twitter-world.

KEYWORDS:

• Twitter
• Donald J. Trump
• narcissism
• hate speech
• media ecology

Notes on contributor

Brian L. Ott is Professor and Chair of Communication Studies in the College of Media & Communication at Texas Tech University. He is the author of The small screen: How television equips us to live in the information age and critical media studies: An introduction (2nd ed.), as well as a co-editor of It’s not TV: Watching HBO in the post-television era, places of public memory: The rhetoric of museums and memorials, and The Routledge reader in rhetorical criticism.

Notes

1 I’m calling it the “Age of Twitter” both because this essay is primarily about Twitter and because I like the linguistic parallelism with the Age of Typography and the Age of Television. But the Age of Twitter is really the Age of Social Media.

2 After Donald Trump formally became the Republican nominee for President, his Twitter feed saw an uptick in more positive, supportive messages, though his highly negative Tweets continued. Analysis of his Tweets suggests that “the more haughty, critical ones come from an Android device, while the nice ones comes from an iPhone … [leading to the] suspicion that the Android tweets are written by Trump himself [and the] iPhone tweets might be penned by his campaign staff” (Matyszczyk, 2016).

3 Twitter increasingly performs the agenda-setting function in politics once dominated by television. Television or, at least, televised news now follows the lead of Twitter. Gone are the days when TV journalists engage in serious investigative reporting, challenge obviously false and misleading information, or just generally report on events of public significance. Frankly, I’m nostalgic for the world of television that Postman (1985) argued, produced the “least well-informed people in the Western world” by packaging news as entertainment (pp. 106–107). Twitter is producing the most self-involved people in history by treating everything one does or thinks as newsworthy. Television may have assaulted journalism, but Twitter killed it.