Whereas most comics have been content to mock Twitter for merely being Twitter (seed of the demon Internet and destroyer of all that is good), Doonesbury has used it much more effectively. Because in Doonesbury Twitter is not just a funny-sounding social networking device that wants to kill newspapers. Instead, it is a funny-sounding social networking device that characters actually use in ways that tell us (largely unflattering) stuff about them.Specifically, in this strip here, we see Roland Hedley using it in a way that suggests he is an arrogant, superficial ass. Hedley was an ass long before Twitter, of course, but Twitter allows him to be an ass in new and exciting ways. It also works as a pretty solid little satire of all the public figures who use Twitter in ways that suggest that they too are arrogant, superficial asses.
None of this is to argue that Gary Trudeau actually likes Twitter. On the contrary, he seems to have as much contempt for it as any other newspaper cartoonist. It's just that he knows the best way to satirize it is to actually take it seriously and integrate it into his fictional world. The barbs are more likely to stick that way.
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