I'm quite an enthusiastic social media user. I'm not entirely sure why, maybe I like to think I'm down with the youths (year, right) or maybe it's just the logical development of my column writing and then this blog, with due deference to the somewhat sad fact that there's something to be said for the theory that communications between members of the human race are dwindling down to status updates and the character-limit set by text messages, which have morphed into tweets.

If there is something to be said for this theory, it's not something that is very encouraging to hear, because it means that a) it seems that it is accepted that the attention span of your average consumer of media is now akin to that of a distracted fly and b) the tendency of the political classes to communicate in sound-bites is given fuel on which to feed, giving them an excuse, perceived or not, to keep things on the totally shallow level.

We've seen this happening with the inveterately shallow, the Pullicino Orlandos of this world, for instance, whose every Facebook status update is given news value by a media culture that seems to have as its primary agenda the theory that anything that is critical of the Government is worth splashing onto page one. Fair enough, the Government is there to be lambasted, but by means of quoting the status updates of people like JPO, who seems to think that broadcasting his choice of tea and his pithy political comments are on a par with each other?

I hardly think so.

So when I read, in a story about how the country has gone into statistical recession (and that does not mean that we don't have enough statistics, of those we have many and a surfeit) that "Opposition leader Joseph Muscat tweeted that an economy in recession needed sound decisions and a focused leadership steering it towards growth" I tend to shake my head in wonderment that we've been reduced to this. He went on to say, apparently, that "The PL team had the credentials to deliver", though whether this was in the same tweet and whether he'd gone over the character limit, I have no idea and no interest in finding out.

What a depressing landscape the upcoming campaign presents. Smug tweets, masquerading as policy statements and valid suggestions for the future.