Coastal Elites Can't Decide: Is Twitter a Force for Good or
Evil?S  Have you heard? All the trouble the president's been
having with his health care initiative is Twitter's fault. So
says ad man James Othmer in a New York Times op-ed. Wait, wasn't
Twitter saving Iranian democracy like 10 minutes ago?  Yes it
was. In the summer, the coastal elites hailed Twitter's
brilliant simplicity for allowing the microblogging service to
route around authoritarian sensors and transmit poignant
messages that made otherwise apathetic Americans really care
about Iranian activists, as evidenced by their willingness to
turn digital avatars green.  But now they're starting to fret
that Twitter and its social networking brethren, like Facebook,
are not so much simple as simplistic; reductive media that
distill a complex debate like universal health care down to its
most emotional, televisable sideshows. Of course, we've seen
this flip flop before: Hollywood celebrities fell in love with
Twitter as a free marketing channel, then