Aasif Mandvi on Twitter and Trevor Noah

I think its more a question about Twitter. I think it’s much ado about nothing, first of all. The guy made some sort of, you know, off-color, irresponsible tweets, but he was trying to be funny. I think the Millennials understand this more than the people who are sort of upset about this. Which is this sense of, what is Twitter in our culture? Is Twitter just a constant sort of — is it just disposable? You know what I mean? There’s gonna be a presidential candidate 25 years from now, who’s gonna be running for president. Are we going to go back and look at his Twitter feed from when he was 14 years old? Because he’s gonna have a lot of really stupid things in there, you know? So, how much are we responsible for what we say on Twitter five or 10 years ago? I don’t know. It’s a question and I don’t have the answer, but it feels to me like, are we gonna hold artists, comedians, whatever it is, responsible for stuff they say on Twitter? You can if you want, but I don’t know what that means about our culture, you know? I don’t think we’ve quite decided, what does Twitter mean? Because you could read that and act like he said that yesterday, and it defines him now. Do we all want that? You know what I mean? Do you want your kids going into a job interview and being defined by the Facebook post they put on Facebook when they were 15?

Here's the link (which I initially forgot to put in, d'oh).

The immediacy of Twitter (or of a Discussion Board like DU) is both a strength and a weakness. People are less filtered, more likely to say what they think; but they are less filtered and more likely to say something pretty stupid. Maybe one of the upshots of social media is that we will go back to a much more formal society, where our words will be carefully chosen so as not to create any future problems for ourselves.

Bryant