With lawyers positively swarming the alleys of cyberspace in search of their next hit, it has become too easy for us to use “the Internet” as an excuse to make depressing social diagnoses: “In the case of self-harm, the Internet seems to be fuelling an explosion” (Julie Henry, The Telegraph); “Twitter is just blogging for people with short attention spans” (second-year Historian).

This kind of cynicisim always come from positions of proud superiority (Julie Henry is of the self-proclaimed pre-Internet generation; the historian doesn’t use Twitter) and inevitably involve blurring different technological platforms under generalised umbrella terms like “the Internet,” or clumsily conflating them with words like “micro-blogging”. Glossing the differences like this might have been sufficient once, when computers were first being commercialized and all progress could be relegated into the category of “new thing”, but they are not helpful now.

We are the Generation Y who have grown up with digitized fingertips. Most of us are well-acquainted enough with the Internet to know that it is not one monolithic object that has intruded upon an analogue world, but an organic medium through which creativity and invention can express itself. Chatroulette and Jstor are only as similar as a wooden table and a wooden chair. It would be absurd to equalise them - it is impossible to properly analyse the shortcomings of either if they are allowed to hide behind each other.

A similar principle of maintaining distinctions can be applied to less extreme examples than Chatroulette and Jstor. When talking about Twitter and blogging, it is likewise more productive to focus on differences than similarities. Whereas blogs allow people to publish unlimitedly, Twitter is defined by its restriction of space. While blogs are (often if not always) largely unread, tweets are of a manageable enough size to actually communicate with large audiences.

And yet Twitter’s communications are not drenched in the sweat of social anxiety. Its design has purposefully rejected many of Facebook’s choices, especially with regard to the priority it gives sociality: you don’t request friendship on Twitter, but quietly follow people whose tweets interest you. Those whose pages you look at more frequently don’t shoot to the top of an exposing list of friends. By not assuming, like Facebook does, that its users want to control who follows or ‘friends’ them, Twitter gets rid of the pseudo-privacy paradox that weighs heavy on the conscience of Facebook users.

Thanks to its non-sociality, Twitter has become a democratic method of communication. Because of the brevity of its form, you can tweet at anyone (Ashley Tisdale or an obscure conceptual artist) and be confident that they are more likely to read it than an email. Moreover, because of its character restriction, it will never fully replace other forms of communication, so that while emails heralded the death of physical post Twitter has by no means nullified the importance of emails.

Despite all these dissimilarities, there are certain ways in which Twitter can be made to behave like other digital platforms. Specifically, its ability to syndicate information makes it into a kind of RSS feed – although thankfully one with an aesthetically inoffensive user interface. Because it can adopt this role, Twitter becomes not only a means of communication in itself, but a selection process for longer-form essays and articles. It distils the amalgamated mass of the world’s publishings into helpful summaries from which lines of inquiry can be pursued or ignored. We might dismiss this attribute by saying it facilitates the shortening of human attention spans but equally, for busy people like us, it is a useful tool.

People who complain about having to read things like “I just had a bacon sarnie” reveal the wrong kind of engagement with Twitter. Little soundbites about what people are doing or thinking about are nice when they come from somebody in whose life one is implicated. When tweets are not interesting, they need not be read. As with every new addition to our lives, we ought to maintain some critical distance from what we read and say on Twitter. But contrary to popular belief, Twitter is not a platform which makes this distance particularly difficult to find.