If you enjoyed this clip then you’ve probably wondered if in a year from now you’ll be able to look yourself in the mirror after giving in and jumping on the Twitter bandwagon. I don’t think I’ve ever done anything so lemming-like in my life, or seen my generation so equally whipped and whittled. If Twitter is how we are going to communicate now, then check please. The backlash is coming. Tweet me when it does.

Perhaps I’m just doing it wrong. Maybe I’ll get better. But after reading a story on The Wrap that delved into how some journalists are using it, I started to wonder if the mainstream media will ever recover from the shame of their quick adoption (not that they don’t have other things to recover from, of course). I just might, but these guys, I’m not so sure.

Most severe was the criticism that followed the Rocky Mountain News’ decision to tweet coverage of three year-old Marten Kudlis’ funeral last September. “family members shovel earth into grave,” tweeted a reporter covering the funeral. “earth being placed on coffin.”

The outraged public confirmed that their anger was not only about the messages, but about the medium. One respondent wrote, “Leave the microblogging to Hurricane coverage, sports tickers.” Another was more succinct: “sorry your child is dead kthxbye.”

The reporter was also slighted for spelling errors and grammatical mistakes, since no editor reviewed his tweets before sending them.

But why exactly was the funeral coverage so disturbing? Everything else about what the reporter did — update the community concisely and in real time — is nothing new.

Twitter’s brevity is similar to headlines. Its transmission of media content in real time is hardly different from an email alert, and it’s essentially what live radio and television broadcasting have done for decades. Before that, there were smoke signals.

“You were able to break news instantaneously for more than 150 years if you had a telegraph key; wire services could break news instantaneously, too,” Marc Cooper, the director of digital media at USC said. “So the problem wasn’t, how do you break news? The question was where would it go?”

In the case of Twitter, it goes immediately and without filtering into the bloodstream of the community, aimed at a list of self-selected followers but searchable by anyone.

And that, perhaps, is something that requires adjustment.

“Twitter takes it all a step further,” said The L.A. Times’ Sarno. “It’s zero money, it’s basically zero effort. Anybody can produce content.” Because Twitter produces not only the most media content, but the most unfiltered media content, Sarno said, it falls naturally at the bottom of the media food chain.

But newspapers are shrinking, while Twitter just received $35 million in venture capital investment. With the money, Twitter will now look into generating revenue, which despite its celebrity status it hasn’t yet done.

Whether it turns into a thriving business or not, the current backlash may well prove brief. Twitter only grows.

I really, really hope not.

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Andrew Morrison is a west coast boy who studied history and classics at the Universities of Cape Town and Toronto after an adolescence spent riding skateboards and working in restaurants. He is the editor of Scout Magazine, the weekly food and restaurant columnist for the Westender newspaper, a contributor to Vancouver and Western Living magazines, and a proud board member of the Chef’s Table Society of BC. He lives and works by the beach in Vancouver.

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