Happy 7th bday @twitter. Thanks for broadening & cheapening our lives into an epic parade of excruciating minutiae. (Can we get a retweet?)
— Dan Zak (@MrDanZak) March 21, 2013
It’s the birthday of the thing that turned us into a race of pithy gremlins and time-sucking trolls. Rather than write about What Twitter Means in a Post-Arab Spring World or interview one of the world’s 20 million “social media experts,” we’ll offer you a top-10 list of relevant links (many from Web hostess Monica Hesse) from the last four years of WaPo Twitter coverage:
1. What Twitter gets wrong about politics (March 5, 2013)
2. Twitter: A live megaphone for lobbyists (Feb. 13, 2013)
3. What the Manti Te’o hoax teaches us about the power of social media (Jan. 17, 2013)
4. Tweeting grief over a celebrity’s death says more about us than them (May 24, 2012)
5. The Virtual Gallery of Stupid: Tweets prove we’ve always been dumb (April 26, 2012)
6. The media live in the land of Twitter, but most regular people don’t (Sept. 18, 2011)
7. Twitter archive at Library of Congress could help redefine history’s scope (May 10, 2010)
8. The day Facebook and Twitter crashed (Aug. 7, 2009)
9. The artist who made the Twitter bird got paid less than $7 (June 19, 2009)
10. The glib art of Twitterature (May 19, 2009)
Twitter itself, of course, has released a self-aggrandizing video that depicts itself as mankind’s most sweeping creation. Get a load of this:
