The trouble with Twitter | James Harkin

Far from delivering a 'wisdom of crowds', social networking sites have created only a deafening banalityIn 2003, in an elaborate joke on New York's media-savvy, empty-headed hipsters, a journalist called Bill Wasik sent around an anonymous email suggesting that they congregate at a department store at the same time and stare at a rug. The event was an enormous success, and became the world's first documented example of a "flash mob". By the end of the decade, however, the joke had turned sour, a...

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