I was always shocked at the cultural norms (ideas and behavior) manifest on Twitter and was always repeatedly laughed at (by myself, included) for being concerned about that. Twitter was no representation of real life; but then ever year I see real life (ideas and, maybe, behavior) conforming to yesteryear's Twitter. I do think a lot of things start in Twitter and move out into the mainstream; it's not a bad place to look (if you want to know see where we are headed) or it's a terrible place to look (if you care about where we are headed).
This is possibly self fulfilling: journalists or others pay more attention to Twitter than they “should”, which gives Twitter a disproportionate degree of influence, in turn justifying why they pay attention to it
