Too many words about Twitter
Once upon a time, I really loved Twitter. I joined in 2009, just after I’d moved to Mexico City with a Fulbright. Facebook, which I had joined in 2004, early in my first year of college, already felt like an address book of people I didn’t want to ever talk to again. Twitter offered a kind of refresh of my online connections to friends, something that felt particularly necessary as I became (or at least felt like) one of the first of my college friends to leave New York City. I didn’t have a smartphone—barely anyone in my world did at that point, though that changed, dizzyingly, during the two years I was abroad—so I remember coming home in the afternoon or evening and scrolling through Twitter to see what everyone had posted that day. It definitely took less than 15 minutes. I had other online compulsions (Sudoku, the Gawker family of blogs), but I don’t remember Twitter being one of them. There just wasn’t enough of it.
I moved back to the U.S. in 2011. I got a smartphone and decided to get serious about science writing. This was a little bit after you could become a professional science journalist using only a personal blog, but the online science writing community was going strong, and Twitter was its beating heart. I followed everyone and sometimes posted things that got barely any attention (which felt bad at the time but I’m grateful for it now). As I moved from sending pitches from my childhood bedroom to doing internships at magazines people had heard of, my Twitter feed was the place that made me feel like I could do this. It let me peek into all these conversations being had by people I admired, people who were getting commissions and praise for doing the thing I wanted to do, and I could learn what I needed to know to turn myself into them. That sounds kind of dark now, but at the time it felt not only necessary, but exciting and genuinely fun. I remember running across the office at Wired to tell a friend that a legitimately famous science writer had followed me back. It felt like a huge victory.
In many stories about people’s relationship to Twitter, the next turning point would come after the 2016 election. But for me, there wasn’t really a next turning point. My relationship to Twitter stayed the way it had been at the very beginning of my career—a convenient source of all the links I wanted to read, and a somewhat furtive window into what the people I wanted to be were doing. That category expanded out from just science journalists to include a lot of other kinds of writers and media people. I had moved abroad again, this time without a return date, and so Twitter also offered the uncanny feeling of keeping up with the phantom person I would or could be if I had stayed in the U.S. I would be writing long essays for this obscure but career-making website. I would be at the airport protest. I would be articulating what everyone needed to hear about the coronavirus just before they realized they needed to hear it. I would understand what was happening in the world, and I would have something to say about it.
I’ve been off Twitter for almost a month. I’m pretty sure this isn’t actually the longest I’ve gone without looking at it, but signing off during pandemic isolation has been a very different experience than taking a social media break during a vacation or a reporting trip. The pandemic has demanded that we reflect on everything, and oh, have I reflected. Without my Twitter feed, I have so much space in my own head to do nothing but reflect. I feel like my thoughts and my feelings are exclusively mine in a way I didn’t realize I was missing. (This is…extremely creepy.) I also realized that if I want to have a different relationship with Twitter, I need to acknowledge the good things it once gave me and take the time to (I can’t believe I’m going to use this word) mourn the end of that. Twitter has changed, the world has changed, I have changed, but somehow I thought that every time I logged on, it would still be 2012, and that logging on would make me feel good. I know I am at least four years late to this revelation. What can I say, sometimes it takes a global tragedy with no end in sight to give you the time to really explore what’s going in your subconscious.
Now here is the part I feel icky about. I don’t think I can delete my Twitter account, at least not right now. It’s a genuine part of my platform, which they make you interrogate and articulate when you write a book proposal. I do think people find me and my work that way. And I, in turn, have found many sources and some stories there. Twitter is not without its professional uses, even in 2020. But I know that to be the writer I want to be next, I can’t be gulping down everybody else’s thoughts all the time. I need to protect the space to develop my own.
So it’s time to finally take some advice from our problematic fave Cal Newport. If Twitter serves me as a professional tool, I need to “use it like a professional.” For a long time, I have resisted using social media clients that give you more control over your feed because I thought that interacting with Twitter in the least convenient way possible—through twitter.com in my computer’s web browser—would naturally encourage me to spend less time on it. That’s worked to a certain extent; not having social media apps on your phone really does make a difference. It may have even been enough in 2012. In 2020, though, it’s time to get serious. I downloaded Tweetbot and set it up so that rather than showing me my timeline by default, it shows only tweets from a bot that posts squares of different colors. I made a list of a handful of accounts that help me see what’s going on in the field I cover as a journalist, which I’ll check regularly but occasionally. I’ll post links to my new work and other significant professional announcements. And that’s it.
Maybe at some point, it will make sense to thaw this deep freeze a bit. Or maybe this is a first step toward the full delete. Part of realizing that my relationship to social media changed without me really noticing is knowing that it will very likely change again, and again, and again. I want to be in charge of those changes, rather than mindlessly settling into the grooves the algorithm designs for me. So, uh, don’t @ me. I won’t see it.