My career as a tweeter received a serious setback before it properly started, after the very first message I received on opening my Twitter account came from the president of the United States. I yield to no one in my admiration for Barack Obama, who is sensitive, intelligent and dignified, an astonishing combination for one who also has such forthright political ambition, but I’m sorry, I just didn’t like receiving his tweet.

He shouldn’t be following me. He certainly shouldn’t be the first person to be following me. Of course I know he is not really following me but I don’t think his staff should be following me either. My tweets so far have not been very profound, because if you try to be profound in 140 characters or less, you will sound glib or insane, or both (Friedrich Nietzsche, you were born before your time.)

So my opening salvos in this strange new medium have been slight, rueful observations on my daily routine, which may be vaguely entertaining to those who know me but should on no account go anywhere near the Oval Office if the president is to get on with the business of war, healthcare reform, and so on. I want my tweets to be followed by old girlfriends, the guys I go to football with, and maybe a smattering of professional contacts. Leaders of the free world should be focusing elsewhere, frankly.

It is not as if President Obama’s tweets are a barrel of laughs, anyway. “Get the straight facts about health insurance reform,” was my inbox nadir, closely followed by “On Monday Supreme Court nominee Judge Sotomayor fractured her ankle. Sign her virtual cast”. This is not the kind of wry techno-badinage I signed up for. Yet I cannot quite bring myself to block Obama from following me. I guess it is what they call the prestige of office.

I acknowledge, of course, that the Obama communications team is touched by political genius. It has understood better than anyone the relationship between the democratic impulse and the technological innovations that make instant and widespread communication possible. It doesn’t really matter what is said: it just needs to be out there, and accessible on a 4in telephone.

This is the ultimate example of Marshall McLuhan’s famous observation, made a remarkable 45 years ago, that the medium is the message. Twenty-first century technology has ensured that we are constantly available and in the loop, and that is all we seem to need. It is a kind of triumph for democracy, if not for conspicuous intelligibility.

The same ethic can be felt in much of our cultural produce. Most obviously, it is clearly at work in Antony Gormley’s “One & Other”, the project that has members of the public signing up to spend an hour on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth to do, within reason, what they wish.

It is the process, not the result, that interests us most here. The fact that anyone can mount the plinth is a none-too-subtle deconstruction of the heroic nature of the art all around it; it also provides a genuine snapshot of a complex and multilayered society that is poorly reflected by more conceptually audacious or esoteric forms of art.

Does it supply anything profound? Not that I have heard about or witnessed directly. Does that make it bad art? Well, not necessarily. The very idea that art is for providing us with transcendental experiences and profound insights is taking a hammering at the beginning of the new millennium. It is why we turn with such passion to the arts of the distant past: they are a hangover from a time when artists were revered as society’s new priests, substituting the capricious complexities of the psyche for the certitudes of religious belief in their investigations of the human condition.

But if, as Nietzsche celebrated a century ago, God is dead (a tweet-and-a-half, that one), perhaps we ought to start to contemplate the slow dying of that unashamedly Romantic version of art too. Perhaps our culture today has a more pagan spirit, celebrating participation and communality of experience above idiosyncratic expression.

I realise that will depress some of you: it sounds an awful lot like some form of social engineering. But it is time for the balance to be tilted, only slightly, from the voice of the individual to the wider perspectives of society at large. It is not coincidental that Romantic artists – we are still in thrall to their cold attic studios and their monomaniacal pursuits – flourished in a time of social revolution. They were part of a movement that pitted liberty against authority. But in the west at least, many of those battles have been won, in favour of the individual. Culture has a less rebellious role to play.

The politics of Twitter and the art of the vacant plinth may not provide the epiphanies that we expect from those realms. But they are an affirmation that we all count, in some small way, and they celebrate the very possibilities of mass communication. Those are relatively new ideas but they are of paramount significance. Over to you, Mr President. I know you are following me.

peter.aspden@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/aspden