Far more fundamental is the way Twitter intensifies and amplifies pathological social tendencies among those who act within, report on, and write about the political world. It turns politicians, political staffers, reporters, editors, pundits, and analysts into petty, vain, childish, showoffy, hostile, vindictive, dogmatic, impulsive, careless versions of their best and most professional selves. This makes Twitter horrible for our politics and equally bad for journalism. The single best thing for both politics and journalism would be for Twitter to go out of business tomorrow.
Would I miss it? You bet I would! Twitter for me is partly a 21st-century teletype machine providing the latest breaking news in real time 24 hours a day; partly an endless, gossipy cocktail party with my peers in the media; and partly an incomparable means of promoting my work and interacting with readers and critics. (If you use Twitter mainly to follow celebrities or communicate with friends, your experience is undoubtedly very different than mine.)