While the State Department bureaucracy did a star turn on information age technology Monday--importuning (successfully) Twitter to delay a network repair so as not to shut down Iranian Twitter posting--the fog in Foggy Bottom migrated to the Office of the Secretary. Hillary Clinton said of Twitter: "I wouldn't know a Twitter from a Tweeter." (A Tweet is a message sent via Twitter, a service that broadcasts mini-messages limited to 140 syllables that can be accessed by anyone online who follows Twitter.) Meanwhile Supreme Guide Ali Khamanei uses Twitter to post messages from time to time. (I use Twitter to post daily previews of LFTC entries and to enable my Twitter followers to track my radio appearances.) Atavistic theology works seamlessly with modern technology, while our blase Secretary remains in techno-fog at State.
Peggy Noonan, who "gets" Twitter, wrote of the new Internet services that their creators should grow up:
The great question is what modern technology can do not in the short term so much as the long. It is not the friend of entrenched tyranny. Connected to which, it would be nice if the technologies of the future were not given babyish names. Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc., have come to be crucial and historically consequential tools, and yet to refer to them is to talk baby talk. In the future could inventors please keep the weight and dignity of history in mind?
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