When Channel 4 makes a documentary series about one of the poorest streets in Britain, you're no longer expecting (as you might have done in, say, 1983) a reflective and contextualised look at how people make lives for themselves in adverse circumstances.

Benefits Street, which started on Monday, goes much further than that. I've never seen a programme so obviously edited in order to generate Twitter posts. You can call a series anything you like – and at least Benefits Street, though inflammatory, isn't as crassly judgmental as the BBC's equivalent, Saints and Scroungers – but Channel 4 knows what it's doing, and is quite happy to do the government's dirty work.

The series jettisons the long, commentary-free scenes of true observational filmmaking in favour of trailer-sized soundbites designed to circumvent real debate. The first episode introduces a number of residents of James Turner Street, a road of terraced houses within walking distance of Birmingham city centre. Dee, a likeable and level-headed mother, is pigeonholed from the moment she appears. She is not simply bringing up two children, the narrator tells us, but "bringing up two children on benefits". When Danny, a youngish recidivist, is talking about his litany of convictions, the Benefits Street hashtag flashes handily on screen. No opportunity to reflect; no chance to observe that Danny is perfectly aware of the petty stupidity of his life as it is now. Only instantaneous judgments are invited, in 140 characters or less.

A third of children in Birmingham live in poverty. As well as Winson Green, they live in places like Kingstanding, and Stechford, and Hockley – none of which the programme-makers are likely to have had heard of, given that they're poor without being edgy. In the words of geographer Danny Dorling, they're the kinds of places where, as streets and neighbourhoods become more polarised over time, "just to get by is extraordinary".

There's a wilful ignorance at play here: a casual blindness to the fact that the people living on James Turner Street lose any say they have in how they are portrayed as soon as the makers of the series enter the editing suite. Some residents are said to feel betrayed, yet the imbalance of power from the outset determined how their lives would be shown.

The sort of lives that make sense to TV producers – middle-class lives, the lives of people they know and associate with – are infinitely more likely to be shown in the whole and documented without judgment. The lives of people who rarely get to speak, in full, about their day-to-day experiences will be subject to a travesty of that whole. The blunt immediacy of TV only makes this more pronounced, with a disproportionate and detrimental impact on those without power.

Benefits Street is, in spirit, straight out of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle: a sort of visual vomit-fest in which you can binge on things you purport to hate the sight of, and then purge yourself on Twitter, venting empty outrage then going back for more.

How I long for circumstances in which Channel 4, true to its original spirit, actually sets up home in Winson Green, asks people what they think a programme about their lives should show, and involves them in every aspect of its making. That would be difficult, wouldn't it? It would require communication, responsibility and an understanding that people who seem to be utterly unlike you are also human.

Lynsey Hanley is the author of Estates: an Intimate History