Twitter, twittering and twits

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Until this point Twitter has always seemed to be a losing game for anyone with something intelligent to say. Twitter even takes the banes of modern life (multitasking and the short attention span) and builds it into the system. Tweets are very short- only a sentence or two which means that it is only possible to make assertions- never reasoned arguments. This results in a superficial communication that does indeed resemble the twittering of birds.
Feminism is well suited to this sort of communication because it is not based upon reasoned argument. It is far easier to say 'all men are bastards' than it is to refute it. This is because 'all men are bastards' is a better soundbite and it requires no thought to grasp it. Feminism is also the established ideology- which makes it easy to speak in soundbite and be understood. The reader is not being told anything they have not been told a thousand times before.
I began to understand that Twitter does have a purpose when the super injunction issue broke in the UK. A number of celebrities have been slapping 'super injunctions' on the media to prevent stories of their sexual adventures reaching the public. These are stories the British media love most (sex and celebrity equals newspaper sales) and in each case the celebrity was able to persuade the judge that there was no legitimate public interest in the case. In one case a kiss and tell girl seemed to be blackmailing a celebrity by telling him that she would 'have to' sell her story to the media unless he paid her not to.
In each case I think the judge did the right thing.
My issue with super injunctions is that they cover their tracks. Nobody can report the existence of a super injunction and so we have no idea how they are being used. In France this sort of thing is often used to cover up corruption.
Fortunately the story spread like wildfire through twitter. A ridiculous pantomime took place as the media commented upon the fact that the story was on twitter- while not mentioning what the story actually was. Eventually the storm broke when an MP mentioned the affair in Parliament which placed the whole thing in the public domain.
It seems from this that twitter enjoys a semi privileged legal status. The authorities will not track down twitters but will prosecute the mainstream media for telling the same story. This means that there is more free speech on twitter than eleswhere- even on blogs like this one.
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