Don't @ Me

Attentionconservation notice: Rationalizing my gut-level dislike of a socialmedium as Objectively Correct. First drafted in mid-2017, left to rest in mydrafts folder because, while sincere, it feels a bit mean. Posted now becauseI found myself re-writing the next-to-last paragraph.

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If, as Leibniz has prophesied, libraries one day become cities,there will still be dark and dismal streets and alleyways as there arenow. --- Lichtenberg

I mentioned, some years ago, that in response to reader requests I have aTwitter account. I use this onlyfor announcing new posts here. Messages sent to it will go unread; attempts tocommunicate through it will be fruitless.

I have, nonetheless, put some time over the years into observing Twitter; Iwish I had it back again. There are, so far I can see, only four gooduses for Twitter:

1. Announcements of actual, substantive posts, resources or discussionselsewhere. (But we have e-mail and RSS already.)
2. Announcing off-line events, details given elsewhere.
3. Snapshots of cute animals, pretty landscapes, children's birthday parties, and the like.
4. Jokes.

For everything else, well, if someone had deliberately tried to combine theworst features of comments sections and Usenet, they could hardly have donebetter --- except by first imposing silly length restrictions, followed bykludged-on threads that make Usenet seem a model of clear organization, plus ofcourse an interface that channels people towards the outrage(or maincharacter) of the moment.

I don't know whether it makes peopleunhappy and angry, or whether only unhappy, angry people persist in using it,but I am not joking when I say that we would all be better off if itdisappeared immediately.

--- One of my long-held semi-crank notions is this: all onlinecommunication, being through writing, reproduces the social dynamics ofliterary communities,especially print-literarycommunities. This law holds independent of the educational level or evenintellectual seriousness of the participants. Thus flame-wars, sock-puppets,selective quotation, trawling through the archive for discreditable episodes,"the lurkers support me ine-mail", creatingisolated fora to incubate increasingly weirdideas, recycling fromsupposedly-authoritative source texts long after they're debunked (if theywere ever bunked in the first place), spastic attention cascadesinwhich "allfandom was plunged into war", etc., escape from the pages of the littlemagazines (such asthe PhilosophicalTransactions of the Royal Society), to become part of everyone'slife. Twitter has raised this to a new level of awfulness, by making it veryhard to actually contribute anything of value, or, having done so, for othersto find it and build on it, while still preserving the affordances forweirdness, meanness, and spasm-proneness.

That is my opinion; and it is further my opinion that you people should getoff my lawn.

Update, 28 May 2022, further to the theme, in no particular order:

• C. Thi Nguyen, "Twitter, the Intimacy Machine"
• A. A. Forst, "The Poisoned Chalice of Hashtag", Catalyst 4:2 (Summer 2020) (*)
• Chris Hayes, "On the Internet, We're Always Famous", The New Yorker 24 September 2021
• Fonda Lee, "Twitter Is the Worst Reader"
• &