Twitter as a superficial medium?

Lately there seems to be a lot of criticism about new media. A common reason is the superficiality that these media would have, its influence on human relationships, the communication and the language. Whether or not this is true, it is a fact that these media, like Twitter, have caused a lot of incidents in the Netherlands. For instance a journalist had to admit that he had wrongly sent a tweet that Mubarak died, but also a 17-year old student got suspended from school because of an announcement on Twitter that said there was going to be a bomb attack.

It is important to note that our society has changed. First there was an oral culture, then there was a writing culture. With the advent of digital media there is a mix between the two. You could say these  media are superficial, but they are spontaneous for sure. Actually, all that the social media do, is register the smalltalk, gossip and nonsense that we talk about. It is true that in 140 characters there is not much opportunity to create immersion, but it is enough to refer to immersion, for example by retweeting and hyperlinks. Twittering is like talking, but now the conversation just gets published. Texting has caused some interpretation problems, but they stayed private. Twitter is more like public texting, so what’s the big deal? We were already familiar with texting, right?