On Twitter and the Freedom of Speech

Who wouldn’t crave for remote hearing?

Imagine, for a moment, that you can listen to whatever every human being on Earth is saying; that whenever someone opens their mouth to say anything, it reaches your ears. Surely it would be overwhelming since there are so many people talking in the same time, so you’d end up going in a frenzy by this information overload. It wouldn’t be useful at all and you’d wish you were deaf.

Now, imagine the same thing, but this time you’ve got a very cool built-in feature in your brain that’s called “selective hearing“, which is the ability of your brain to selectively tune-in and hear only those people that you wish to do so. This way you could focus on those people whose sayings appear to be important to you in some way, and you could always mute or un-mute people’s voices in your brain at will.

Obviously, the latter would be very useful since it would give you the ability to tune-in to the sayings of different people of varying age, gender, race and culture; some kind of long-distance telepathy that would enable you to connect with dozens, hundreds or even millions of people worldwide who you would never have the chance of meeting up close or getting to listen to what they have to say. And it would be your own choice whether to listen to them, or not.

This is what Twitter is all about

If you can imagine this, then you have successfully grasped the idea of how Twitter works. It’s nothing but a tool that lets you say out loud anything you want. Anything. It’s like some sort of digital “voice” (only in written text) that reaches the farthest corners of Earth (as long as there’s Internet access), and everyone else can selectively tune-in to your digital voice at will. You follow (“tune in to”) the people whose voice is somehow meaningful to you, and let the rest go on talking without their talk reaching your “ears”. It’s dead simple, efficient and powerful.

Now, selective hearing is based on your ability to decide whose digital voice you get to pay attention to, or not; if you don’t think it’s worth listening to whatever some person is saying, you can just un-follow the person and therefore “tune out” of its voice. It’s that simple. No-one said you have to try and pay attention to thousands of people at the same time, it gets incomprehensible and it all breaks down. That’s why you get to choose who to follow and who not to.

But once you do follow somebody, that means that you are acting as a receiver of their “digital voice channel”, and of course you’re not alone; hundreds of even thousands other people may also be receivers to that person’s voice. In the same time you’re acting as a transmitter yourself, since you’re transmitting your own voice to the Twitterverse (Twitter Universe), where other people may opt-in to listen to.

If you don’t like what’s on the radio, just change the channel

When you’re listening to the radio and you don’t like the music its playing, what do you do? Do you call the producer of the show to complain about the bad music and ask them to comply to your taste, or just change the channel? Since Twitter is the equivalent of a medium through which millions of people get to have their own digital “radio” show (only in text, not voice) to express their thoughts and emotions out to the world in general and to no-one in particular, would you ever “call” them to tell them that that they should stop saying what they’re saying because you just happen not to like it?

Of course not. You would just change the channel. Therefore, when you don’t really like what someone is saying out loud to the world, remember that your selective hearing lets you tune out and recover your peace and serenity. Just un-follow them, but never ever tell people what they should say and what they should not, unless freedom of speech is lost and you get to decide what’s worthy of being spelled out and what’s not.