Saying that twitter is anything like the sociopolitical dynamics of pre-1500 is just as ludicrous as your other statements. You're acting like hiding in a hole and ignoring the issues around you is the right thing to do.. and trying to sell it like you've discovered this new and better way to live.
In pre-modern times one talked to more people, sometimes in a single day, than one would ever read in one's lifetime. Today it's the opposite: we will always read/see/hear from more sources that we cannot converse with than we will ever speak to. Twitter allows you great opportunity for dialogue again. It's the first social network that's gotten good at this way of interacting.
Declining to read news sites and ignoring capital P Politics is not hiding in a hole. Perhaps its having priorities that are too different than the ones you're used to, but if that's the case I hope it gives you pause.
The rebuttal here isn’t that declining to read news is hiding in a hole, it’s that getting your world-view updates (“news”) by following individuals on Twitter is worse.
For instance, it’s been argued that the “low-information” Twitter bubble is partly culpable for Hillary’s loss.
Having read your assertions here and your link, it seems your premise is based on a misunderstanding of historical and modern sociology of both conversation and information propagation.
You’re focusing on mass media as though it replaced conversation. It’s not at all clear that it did.
People still converse verbally as much as they used to, but with today’s mobility patterns the interlocutors they encounter in person both among acquaintances and at random today are more diverse than those they rubbed shoulders with 500 years ago. And each of those can converse with a more diverse group in turn.
By sifting through and following a subset of Twitter, you’re (however unintentionally) narrowing your aperture, and you tend to end up consuming bon mots like bonbons rather than engaging in deeper dialog opportunistically or spontaneously.
Before Twitter, its mode of communication was called micro-casting:
You’ve drawn a line between TV or radio and Twitter as though it’s conversational, but once you account for the ratio of pub to sub, from followed to followers, you see it’s not the same mode as conversation. On the contrary, you’ve just self-selected your own personalized micro-channel, and are recommending others do the same to the exclusion of thoughtfully curated information from a long evolving school of journalistic practice.
At the same time, despite Netflix, Twitter, or Facebook, the art of serious and coherent conversation endures, ideally informed by both individual interests and shared news of significance:
From the town crier to the newsprint to today’s subscriptions to Reuters, ProPublica, economist, guardian, wapo, nyt, etc. (see link for independent sources), curated and contextualized news has informed local conversation, national debate, and societal outcomes.
That value is being challenged by advertising driven content mills, which degrades the quality of news, but selecting vetted journalistic sources is not particularly different from selecting which Twitter quipsters to follow.
Some sources are tilting at the ad supported windmill, trying to find alternative economic models for journalism:
To quote from that link, “... at the end of the day, we live in the real world. It’s what makes journalism so essential and durable: a free society’s demand to know what’s happening will never cease.“
