Representative Anthony Weiner is not the first public figure to be undone by an errant hand on his Twitter. But he’s now the most prominent person to be damaged by the very immediacy and reach that make Twitter such a powerful tool. One lapse of judgment or one false click after several lapses of judgment and a career implodes. For lack of a better word, let us call this increasingly common phenomenon twimmolation.
In Weiner’s case, he had been using Twitter