Before the internet, a journalist would write an article about a company that the company felt was unfair and missed a point. All they could do was write a letter to the editor and wait, and maybe a week later it would be printed, or not. Now, they can go to medium.com and immediately publish a long rebuttal, saying the journalist forgot this and did not consider that, the analyst is wrong here. Everybody pulls that immediately into the debate. So it is a much more democratic field for ideas.
Certainly I'm not going to sit on the Internet all day and read what Sam from Iowa is saying about me. But I'm a sponge. I've always been a sponge.
I have a lot of Twitter rules. I never swear on Twitter, and if anybody's inappropriate, I block them. I have young followers.
In Michelle Obama attack on Donald Trump, she never mentioned Trump's name, but she made reference to the fact that this is much more important than just responding in 140 characters. And in the process she maligned the whole concept of Twitter, not just Trump.
With true free speech has to come an understanding of when and when not to use it. But you can't legislate that. It must be voluntary - especially in a world where a whisper can reach a million people in an eye blink.
I hear [my Twitter followers] say, you know, 'Bob Rae, you're an asshole'. [...] I'm working my way and trying to represent the people and speaking in Question Period and here we have vox populi, the thoughtful man on the street, 'you are an asshole!'. Thank you very much. I read it on my Twitter and I get up and ask a question.
I'm very aware that when my friends and I sit around over dinner these days, the conversation invariably turns to how crass the world has become. Tweeting? It's one of the silliest things ever.
I think of Twitter as the place where I go to have a great conversation when I can't have one locally, which seems to be all the time, and the more time that I spend on Twitter, the more I sort of curate this incredible group of very intelligent people that I just get to know purely through the quality of their thoughts.
Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose.
Generally, the view that I've had on Twitter is if you're on Twitter, you're in, like, the meme - you're in meme war land. If you're on Twitter, you're in the arena. And so, essentially, if you attack me, it is therefore OK for me to attack back.
The level of backlash [for the True Detective] was kind of fascinating and not fully shocking because I know what the world of the internet is and how it's a platform to project their greatest anger and frustrations. But it's also a place where people can wax lyrical and be effusive in their glowing fondness of something.
You can still say whatever you want to say on social media, but you have to be willing to stand by your words.
It's the nature often on social media that people say things without really thinking through their position.
The transition from unknown to known-in-publishing has been empowering but also challenging. It's an honor to know that people actually want to know what I think about certain issues, but I also have to be careful about what I say or, rather, how I say it. The Internet is forever, y'all.
I feel - and this goes back to social media and freedom of speech - when you're on a public platform, and you put something out there in front of people who don't know you, they might just perceive it in a very different way altogether.
Whether or not Twitter makes you stupid, it certainly makes some smart people sound stupid.
Self-control is needed in the age of technology. Folks have to apply their sense in reacting to different things. I don't appreciate perverse and venom-spewing mindset.
Most of the serious disagreement I get comes through email or social media, where people are more comfortable.
That's what's so great about the Internet. It allows pompous blow-hards to connect with other pompous blow-hards in a vast circle-jerk of pomposity.
The Internet and Twitter and all these things are very powerful, but it also means sometimes that instead of having a dialogue we just start calling folks - calling each other names. And that's true on the left or the right.
Texting is a supremely secretive medium of communication - it's like passing a note - and this means we should be very careful what we use it for.
The public discourse online is not done through the polite language of debate.
When it comes to social media tea, I recommend that you take it offline. Keep your comments at Happy Hour.
You can be tweeting strangers and saying, 'Don't say that,' but are you saying that to your friends? How about your mom? Your boyfriend at the dinner table who says something homophobic? If you're not saying the same things in person that you're saying online, then what are your tweets doing?
Technology gives us power, but it does not and cannot tell us how to use that power. Thanks to technology, we can instantly communicate across the world, but it still doesn't help us know what to say.
