Elon Musk, insanely wealthy and looking to fend off boredom, has decided he wants to buy Twitter. He says he’ll pay $43 Billion. Twitter doesn’t want to be bought and thinks it has a poison pill that will keep it Muskless. He has suggested these are just the opening rounds of what can become an increasingly nasty fight.
We don’t twitt. We don’t Facebook. Both refusals probably are to our disadvantage when it comes to sharing this twice-a-week wisdom. But, frankly, we have a life and it’s not spent focusing on what’s between our thumbs.
When Twitter first came along, the Missourinet news staff was told it was going to have to start using it because it was the coming thing in communication. The example given of its usefulness was a narrative series (forgive me, friends, I abhor the word “tweets”) of a friend of ours who was going somewhere and reported at various times that he had arrived at the airport, had been checked in, was waiting to board, was boarding, and was sitting on the airplane that was spending too much time packing in the passengers..
The Missourinet staff was unimpressed beyond description.
A few days later, your observer, the now-retired Missourinet news director saw a message from a friend who told the world that she was going to have to stop on her way home from work to get a new sump pump.
The news director quickly dubbed Twitter “the theatre of the inane.”
While Twitter has proven to be useful in distributing news in real time (as well as lies, conspiracies, accusations, and general trash), it still is awash in inanities.
Representative Harry Yates of St. Joseph would not have liked Twitter if it had existed in his day. He introduced a bill in the 1925 legislative session making gossip and scandal-mongering a criminal offense. He proposed fines of ten to one-hundred dollars or a ten-to-fifty day jail sentence for anyone “maliciously repeating or communicating any false rumor or slander detrimental or harmful to another person.”
Yates would, of course, be apoplectic about Facebook.
His bill never made it into the statute books. It had some obviously serious First Amendment problems. And worse yet, if people couldn’t gossip or be mongers of scandals, there would be little to talk about, especially at the Missouri Capitol. The place is a hothouse for gossip of varying degress of veracity.
But then again, imagine how nice would be the Silence of the Thumbs, at least in some places, if Representative Yates had succeeded.