Tag Archives: Twitter

On giving up

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Well I finally quit Twitter. As in I stopped going there everyday, all day everyday intermittently, little bursts of scrolling, the networked reading version of smoking. For the first couple of weeks, Twitter would send me emails saying that I was missing notifications, and I would dutifully (that is, addictively) click over and see that the notifications were bogus. Someone had retweeted someone else, etc. No one was actually talking to me or about me. These emails seem to have stopped. Now Twitter doesn’t even care that I’m not there. 

It’s a strange feeling. At first, I felt completely lost regarding the news. For some people, for normal people, this would have felt freeing, but I felt anxious. Something out there was happening, and I didn’t know the first thing about it. I didn’t even know the bad jokes about it. I didn’t know the memes. I hadn’t followed its digestion through the memeplex. I was losing touch with the references. Has my other internet usage increased to make up for the absence? For sure. I admit this with shame. The problem is that Instagram is, at its core, hopelessly boring. It’s mostly bad pictures that are advertisements. Even the people who think they are being sincere are posting advertisements, ads for their own vestigial sincerity. I gave up reading the Facebook wall a couple years ago (helpfully blocked by an app). Youtube is briefly distracting, but it is filled with so much algorithmic garbage that it’s like the broader streaming services: unless you already know what you intend to watch, you’re already lost. Plus Youtube is enough like sitting on the couch and watching an old-fashioned TV that it triggers my goofing-off alarm more reliably. It doesn’t have the academic veneer of reading. It doesn’t give the clean-burning freebase jolt of Twitter. 

So there’s nowhere to go now. I have nothing to do. There are about five sites I routinely check, even though it’s mostly muscle memory at this point. They no longer spark joy, as the saying goes. There are three individuals whose tweets I miss. I will not name them. About every other day I google their names, and the search results include their last five tweets, which I can read without visiting the forbidden site itself. This has proven to be enough, a methadone for my madness. I don’t want to see all their tweets all the time anyway. I just miss their voices, their quips, their amusing links to other bits in the web of distraction. It helps that there are only three people who I can remember to google. There are others who are totally lost to me, who I only knew via Twitter and their prose-forged personalities there. I miss them, but I am also happy to be free of them because their near-constant presence was agitating. This is especially fraught for writers who are so composed in one form and so un-composed on Twitter. We’re all just so annoying on Twitter, myself included. 

I wish I could say I quit because of Elon or some political reason, but the truth is that I quit because it was ruining my life, if just in a small way. When your kids joke that you’re addicted to Twitter; when you go to the bathroom in the middle of a dinner out mostly so you can look at Twitter; when you keep erecting barricades to prevent yourself from seeing so much Twitter, only to figure out ways to tunnel through regardless, it’s time to stop. It’s embarrassing. It’s a waste of time. It’s corrosive to your sense of proportion. If you could have moderated your interaction with all that decontextualized language, you would have done so long ago. Except for the occasional promotional link to a blog bost I had almost entirely stopped writing tweets. It was the reading that was always a problem, getting caught in the machine zone, which had been fun, could still be fun, but in smaller and smaller proportions. One went scrolling for the 5% of fun to be found, somewhere. When had it stopped being fun? I don’t want to depress everyone, myself included, by doing that math right now. 

Of course none of this has solved the main problem, that being the internet and how it is the perfect complement to my own will to distraction. I don’t really mean the useful parts of the internet. Google maps is great. Zillow is provocative. Uber is handy on a trip. Having a boarding pass on my phone? Also neat. I like texting everyone. Big thumbs up for texting. Sending pics of the dog doing something cute. All that. I do have a thing now where the sound of texts arriving throws me into a medium panic, but that’s an essaylet for another day. What I mean really is the news, the updates, the media. I would say social media but really it’s anything that’s remotely close to “media.” Anything that moves faster than an ebook. (My review of all ebooks: convenient, but hard to browse.) Wikipedia is addictive in its own way, but it’s like gorging on steel-cut oats. You’ll get full before you do any serious attentional damage. Instead it’s the trolling for stimulation under the guise of being informed, checking one’s internet traps for tasty bits of dirt. What would it be like not to check anything, not to feel the need to check on stuff, to use the internet purely as a tool and not as a mechanism to goof off, which really is mechanism for entertainment, which really is a mechanism for self-soothing, self-care, if you will, a soothing agent, a drug, an opiate for the masses. Hey, if that phrase hasn’t been taken yet, dibs!

I like the idea of Lent, even if I never give anything up. Lent is a reminder, an italicization of the last third of winter, the final blow, the bleakest turn, the unambiguously worst part of the year. You should give up something for Lent, because you have to give up something for Lent, because the root cellar is nearly exhausted along with one’s patience for shoveling snow. My affinity is mostly gestural here in the south, where today it was in the mid-80s. This is one of our false springs. 

For years I have joked that “this year for Lent I am simply giving up.” But perhaps I should make it more literal and give giving up a try. I should give up keeping up. Stop reading the news. Stop diverting myself. Stop checking in. Stop refreshing. Stop looking, stop searching. I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. Thus spake Bono, so many moons ago. You probably didn’t realize that he was singing about my problems with the internet back then. 

I don’t know what I would do with this free time created by not checking on the internet. It would take me being a different person to accomplish it, but through this effort I maybe then could become yet another different person. And maybe I would like that person better? Or maybe I wouldn’t recognize that person at all.

Writers Are Depressing

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It’s true. It was always true. But it’s even more true now that we are in plague times. I follow several writers on Twitter, and for the past three months they have really been excelling in the depression department. I realize that there is plenty to be depressed about in these unprecedented times, but this is a layer above, a top spin on the already sad news of the day. Perhaps it’s a consequence of imagination, of a need to project into a fictional future. Perhaps it’s just the tendency to push rhetoric forcefully unto its limits. Perhaps it’s the ability to pluck out the most alarming/rhetorically forceful detail from a news story. There is one writer I follow, R, whom I really enjoy and whom (in this fantasy of friendship) I get along with splendidly. But R possesses a golden eye for the most disturbing snippet of the most disturbing news story of the day, an ever escalating stream of alarmisms. Turning over one of his quotations in the daily leaf pile that is Twitter is like being bitten by a sleeping snake — in the eye. 

Certainly I’m not depressing to be around. You either, dear friend. But in general writers are depressing, anxious, inward curling, and yet highly strung, excessively verbal, overly self-conscious. I am generalizing recklessly, but hopefully I’m not wrong, or not entirely wrong. I went to a writers’ conference once; it was simultaneously a thrilling experience and also a black hole of insecurity. Everyone needed a hug but no one was spiritually able to accept a hug. At least theater people are entertaining. 

A smarter person would have gotten off Twitter years ago. 

I reconnected with an old friend and discovered that he’d never signed onto Facebook. It was like finding someone who had never done drugs. How refreshing! What a naive, healthy blessing! Then, a couple of months ago, he signed up. Why would he do this? Why would he weather the social pressure of that platform’s plateauing domination? Why get this far only to succumb now? I think he’s still off Twitter but I’m too nervous to ask. 

I used to think that the main problem with Twitter was that its signal-to-noise ratio was broken. That is, everyone links to the same junk over and over. That is, entire conversations manifest in a private language of meme exchange. But instead Twitter is all signal, overwhelming signal — everyone signalling constantly with nuclear force. Every tweet is overburdened with meaning, overt or implied, a rhetorical peacockery. Everyone was insufferable on Twitter already and a slow-moving global catastrophe has only made this worse. The human quality previously known as charm now has the half life of your sourdough starter. To follow a person’s Twitter stream with any granularity is to become convinced they’re growing progressively unhinged. Unfortunately, this is also the only way to understand a person’s Twitter stream.  

And this is not to imply that these Twitter writers aren’t genuinely upset or don’t have legitimate reasons to feel upset. Lord knows they do. Perhaps all this note is is an admission that I can no longer stand the unrelenting broadcasting of their anxieties, and yet, paradoxically, I am seeing exactly what I’ve chosen to see. I have both clamped my own eyelids back and begun the unending scroll of horrors.

Another writer I follow — S — says that no one should be writing during this time, and that people should especially not write about this time. This is the same person who chronicles her life in graphomaniac detail, a fractured diary years in the making, a serialized hot mess. (It is wildly entertaining.) Her point is that this writing will surely be bad, which is probably true, though I don’t know what metric she’s using to determine what bad means. I think she resents people being performatively sensitive, which, okay: noted.

T is yet another writer I follow, one I admire to an almost painful degree. I don’t believe in writely perfection, in terms of prose or persona or general gestalt, but if I did, he would be it. And this ongoing calamity has turned T into a puddle, linguistically speaking. The reason you follow someone in the first place is you admire their prose and the way their sensibility filters through that prose. But in the context- and editor-free agglomeration of tweets you see that same personality and that same prose in all of its backstage, make-up-smeared freakyness. But it’s not backstage. There is no backstage anymore, at least not online. There are only additional trap doors of performance. 

A couple of other writers I follow (I know, I know: get off Twitter) have disappeared from the platform entirely over the past two months. They’ve obviously gone into hiding. They know when to hunker down, go dark with their verbs. The tweeting-writers who continue to thrive are the ones that dish out generalized, feel-good, you-got-this cheerleaderism. It’s a kind of tweet-hug, and I’d accept it if I were able. 

I feel like Twitter is a kind of live action role playing, but whereas other LARPing activities have separate characters and plots that move alongside life, Twitter LARPs with the same ingredients of actual life. It’s like a laminate of language wrapped over the coarse plywood of everyday activity. It feels apiece with the real thing but it’s actually a veneer upon the real. Within the scroll, it feels the closest thing to life, but when you’re simply walking around the real world (back when you could do that), you are confronted with real people who don’t know you’re playing the game and who can’t catch your signals. 

Why I’ve spent countless hours reading these unhinged fragments thumbed out by strangers is a question for a licensed professional, or God. But perhaps the better question is why do I feel compelled to follow anyone at all? Besides, no one can withstand that much unaccommodated attention — even happy people.

And now this

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I’ve written another short essay and posted it to Medium. It’s called “Coincidental Religion” and it’s about the JFK assassination, Don Delillo’s novel Libra, the Boston Marathon Bombing, and Twitter.

Here are three bits of film I discovered after I had finished the essay: two short films by Errol Morris about different aspects of the JFK assassination — The Umbrella Man and November 22, 1963; and a BBC documentary on DeLillo from the early 90s, which is endearingly hokey.

Why did I post it over on Medium and not here? Honestly, I don’t know. I’m still trying to work out my own logic.