To an extent, fair enough: It’s a logic, after all, based on the general truism—and the general truth—that democratization is good. (See the Times article’s focus on Israel’s taking their message “directly to a global audience.”) But this logic has a rather deleterious effect, too, as far as media criticism goes, in that it tends to preclude qualitative analysis of our new media platforms. (See the fact that the Times article provides no criticisms of these platforms.) Once you decide that, for Twitter, a wide audience is a journalistic end in itself—once you decide, in effect, that quantity is quality—then you effectively render the specifics of Twitter—its usefulness as a platform, etc.—to be nearly moot points. And there’s much to criticize—or, at any rate, there’s much to question—about Twitter’s shift from a tool of average citizens, journalists included, to a tool of the military and the government. As is evidenced by the particular bits of text of the Twittered press conference around which the Times wraps the mantle of Historical Precedent:

Question from peoplesworld: 40 years of military confrontation hasn’t brought security to Israel, why is this different?
Answer from israelconsulate: We hav 2 prtct R ctzens 2, only way fwd through neogtiations, & left Gaza in 05. y Hamas launch missiles not peace?


EhsanAhmad: you didn’t get my point that Hammas is an elected govt and if u keep attacking them they got right to attack you
israelconsulate: if hamas’s goal were 2 btr the lives of its cit. they wouldn’t target IL. they would invest in edu/hlth not in bombs


explore4corners: How many attacks have there been against IS in the last 6 months? How many casualties? The MSM doesn’t report that here.
israelconsulate: ovr 500 rockts Hit IL in the 6 mts of CF. per the last 72 hrs mre thn 300 hit IL. kiling 4 ppl & injuring hndrds


carrotderek: On what conditions would Israel consider a ceasefire?
israelconsulate: CF must ensure no more rockets on IL+ no arms smuggling. btw crossings for Human Aid r open and trucks are entering


backlotops: 1 side has to stop. Why continue what hasn’t worked (mass arial/grnd retaliation)? Arab Peace Initiative?
israelconsulate: we R pro nego. crntly tlks r held w the PA + tlks on the 2 state soln. we talk only w/ ppl who accept R rt 2 live.


shahidkamal: Your nation has been disgraced on Twitter. This inverted Nuremberg Trial will not rescue your image.
israelconsulate: the point of this was to hear what ppl say and to share our POV with fellow twitters.

On the face of things, this is all fantastic: regular people—not just press-pass-wielding journalists—asking questions of people in power, and people in power responding, using the digital vernacular of the regular people. How transparent! How wonderfully democratic!

And yet, again, this angle emphasizes the mere fact of democratization over the more salient question of what, exactly, is being democratized. Call it, in this case, the “R rt 2 live” problem. Reading the text of the Israeli consulate’s answers here—rather than hearing them, as we’re used to doing with press conferences—highlights just how glib and PR-y (and, therefore, non-democratizing) the consulate’s messages were. And reading them in texting shorthand, in particular, as if the latest Israeli/Palestinian conflict has been playing out in the barely-there lyrics of a tuneless pop production, doesn’t help matters. As long as the people answering questions have public relations, rather than public information, as their primary goal, throwing the doors to a press conference open to the general public won’t make the press conference any better. It’ll just make it more crowded.

Still, a Twittered press conference can be a valuable thing, if only because the platform’s innate brevity—you could even say its innate glibness—works as a fairly damning commentary on the innate glibness of press conferences in general. Twitter, in the crunch of its 140-character cap, affords no room to pretend that a PR person’s answers are, generally speaking, anything but self-serving and perfunctory. On Twitter, in other words, PR people can’t hide behind the false authority of a presidential seal and a tailored suit. All they have is text.

On the other hand, all they have is text—140 characters of text for each tweet. Which is, in nearly every sense, limiting. Considering that those in power, given a choice, would generally opt to say as little as possible during press conferences, should we really be extolling a platform that not only discourages, but prevents, lengthy answers? I’m all for individual journalists tweeting bits of information—or opinions, or observations, or random updates, or what have you—to their readers. I’m all for citizen journalists doing the same. (Al-Jazeera English has some good examples of tweeted reporting about the Gaza situation.)

But when government or military officials are doing the tweeting, that changes the terms of Twitter’s cost-benefit analysis. “The Israeli government is trying to explain a conflict that people write books about, a conflict that newspaper writers struggle to explain in 2,000 words, in 140 characters at a time,” the normally tweetophilic Rachel Maddow scoffs in the Times article. Audiences deserve depth—at all times, but particularly when it comes to a situation as complex as the Gaza crisis. Why, in this context, celebrate discussion of that situation via a platform whose chief drawback—and chief asset—is precisely its simplicity?

If the Israeli consulate were truly interested in having a thoughtful, democratized, Web-based conversation with the global public, you’d think they’d have at least held their press conference as a Web chat—or a similar platform that, while affording widespread participation, also affords the sharing of nuanced information and the provision of necessary context. A platform, in short, that allows for answers to people’s questions that are as long as they need to be.