At 5.38pm on 29 January, the German social theorist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas apparently tweeted the following: "It's true that the internet has reactivated the grass-roots of an egalitarian public sphere of writers and readers." At 5.40, he tweeted again: "It also counterbalances the deficits from the impersonal and asymmetrical character of broadcasting insofar as . . ." At 5.41: ". . . it reintroduces deliberative elements in communication. Besides that, it can undermine the censorship of authoritarian regimes . . ." At 5.44: "But the rise of millions of fragmented discussions across the world tend instead to lead to fragmentation of audiences into isolated publics."
Had the 80-year-old doyen of the Frankfurt School for social research joined the twitterati? Or was twitter.com/jhabermas just an elaborate cyber-ruse devised by someone who should really stop mucking about and finish their thesis on Habermas's theory of communicative action? Personally, I couldn't bear to consider the latter: even if he was a hoax, Habermas had at least 7,000 more followers than real me, damn him.
Either way the philosophy blogosphere went into a frenzy of speculation about whether Twitter Habermas was authentic. Arguments raged over whether the messages sounded like him, or if his German-langage posts were sufficiently idiomatic.
All good points, but surely a stronger objection to Twitter Habermas's authenticity came from the fact that all the above tweets were from footnote three to his (surprisingly readable) 2006 paper Political Communication in Media Society: Does Democracy Still Enjoy an Epistemic Dimension? Why would Habermas cut and paste from his own paper? What's more, it's the work of moments to set up a phoney Twitter account to subvert or satirise a celebrity. Cyberspace teems with such shadowy simulacra, real hoaxes and phoney thinkers – if only Baudrillard was alive to bear witness. Finally, on 1 February, the blogger Jonathan Stray (jonathanstray.com) revealed that he had contacted the real Habermas at his home, and asked him if he was on Twitter. "No, no, no," he was told. "This is somebody else. This is a misuse of my name."
But, even though Twitter Habermas is not for real, there are lots of other top global thinkers who could show that Twitter is not just for Wossy and his banal ilk. Zizek, Eco, Hobsbawm, Chomsky – tweet us your thoughts, in 140 characters or fewer.
