Twitter C/D

way too many characters around here tbh

i joined a few months ago, a lot of folks in my field use it and i've found it fun to engage w/ colleagues and share ideas in a loose way

I've been on twitter since 2008 or so, but never really figured out how to use it well. I read it a few times a week, but probably only tweet something a few times a year. I've gone through phases where I've followed irl friends, ilxors, professional colleagues, weirdos, brands, activists, and I kinda hate the resultant paste.

I mostly respond to other ilxors with bad jokes

hey ∞, do you use twitter? i am curious. i always thought that concern over the forced character limit was one of those things that evaporates upon use, or for whichever other reasons is just exclusively held as a kind of theoretical objection. like your cousin-in-law says it after dinner during the holidays - Well!, I don't know how much you can say using [cites wrong number of characters] - & you have to just be like yeah Richard I don't know what to tell you it just isn't really like that. it's like an understanding of anti-depressants as Bad Thought Deleters, just kind of super literally invested in the an outsider's understanding of the concept. twitter is great & super interesting in a million ways, i think, but i think the idea that it's essentially insubstantial is wrong, provably wrong, misunderstands what it means to write out thoughts, something which even if they were subject to character limits one wouldn't be restricted by twitter in expressing (you can link, you can split things into multiple tweets, you can abbreviate, you can grandiosely essay-tweet, &c&c&c). expressive sentences aren't always long & the sort of space a tweet takes up in expression is really beautiful, i think, like it's a proposition, it's phil elverum saying he can 'make you think that'. & i feel like a bunch of stuff that's at least occasionally attached to twitter, ie evidence of its credibility - increased visibility of conversations about social justice, individual international reportage, humour platform less openly unhospitable to women, &c - also rejects the idea that it's vapid, is somehow a truncated form of like ... whatever the thought that ran 179 characters would have been. you know. constraints are good. newspaper writing isn't bad because they needed to make it fit five hundred words. & it's super satisfying to play with arbitrary constraints. i remember going to the dentist & imagining a kind of Foam Dome style hat that would be mounted with two of the weird suction tools the hygienist was using to vacuum my drool, something i could wear around town to be able to drool freely, & being just so satisfied that i could actually compress this hellish vision into something tweet-size, shareable. it got zero favs? so, you know, OBVIOUSLY the system is not perfect. the soundbite panic patron sailor mentions is sort of super interesting & salient too, like i can remember feeling really persuaded by reading that the length of an average interview extract on the news had dramatically reduced, to sort of bumper-sticker proportions, since the '70s or whatever, & that as a result the discourse was impoverished, that our understanding was diminished because nuance was excised. but twitter feels oppositional to that too, just because its breadth can be so wide, & because the practice of using it - seeing someone say something, & then clicking into that, reading whatever else they've wrote, writing them or whatever - is like ... conducive to conversation. short attention span is probably just a fundamental byproduct of info overload stuff, now, like the ship has sailed. twitter is cool though.

i'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but the point was that twitter forces this concept, unlike, for example, this message board, which has no character limit

c'mon, buddy

formal constraints don't dictate content

next

hmm I think they influence it, though

weird twitterers r funny

of course, but twitter doesn't "force" any sort of content

true!

people who do this extended numbered rant thing, I am not sure that is the best use, but the format doesn't preclude it

i mean there are skilled communicators writing of all kinds of great & diverse stuff on twitter 24/7, if you choose to disregard that in favor of a blinkered judgement against the form, well that's on you imho

yeah I mean have you even followed me yet? if not you're missing gems:

https://twitter.com/djperry1973/status/600846435328884736

the form is extremely good which is why so many interesting ppl use it, its the only power user social network

the numbered "tweetstorm" thing is kind of annoying to me, but yeah

you can also tweet links to longer pieces of writing that can't be condensed! imagine that

also people regularly post screenshots of text to get around the character limit

the screenshots of text thing is dumb imo

shld be noted too that systemic police brutality against ppl of color staying in the news is has a lot to do with twitter, ive watched repeatedly as the media attempts to ignore another police murder and protests are organized on twitter and the message is amplified until the media just is forced to pay attention, obvs its not the exclusive reason #blacklivematter is trending but im convinced its key

it also gives people a very linkable, stand-alone platform for scrutiny, for better or worse. some tweets can be taken out of context, but it's also a single place where people have commented over time. so instead of one asshole racist comment on a newspaper story, you get a stream where you can see this person is consistently grinding an axe

I thought the president already had a Twitter.

See, that's a plus: you can have as many Twitters as you want!

it would be nice if most of it were well-intentioned, but it amplifies people's worst side

― F♯ A♯ (∞), Friday, 22 May 2015 18:26 (2 hours ago) Permalink

Have you read this place? ;-) ;-) ;-) ;-) ;-)

LOL Schlump I agree with your post and love that it was made in a way that couldn't be posted on Twitter - how many characters are on your post up there? :-)

Thinking of twitter as an ilx that isn't as time-consuming, plus of course can be used by everyone. Also like the how tags on #issue mean you can read thoughts on it from across the political lines.

Totally unsurprised man of the old ilx have migrated to Twitter. The constraint means you can just about junk the thoughts in a way that you don't feel is necessarily diluted. Twitter has a ton of energy to it, precisely due to its compression of thought. Plus convos are going to not take as much time.

Means that, unlike ilx, you can get other things done.

yeah, totally energetic. or just conducive to that kind of super broad remit. i tweet a lot about nespresso, i feel like i am doing important work in shining a light on its dynamics in the public sphere. twitter is part of a healthy diet, i think. like it works in concert with posting & writing & e-mailing elsewhere. it isn't a logan's run moratorium on all elements of your life never exceeding 140-character utterances ever again, it's this hub through which a lot of other things are routed (it is an interesting, dynamically-different alternative to instagram for posting pics, for example, i think).

re: healthy diet. Yeah I found other outlets for Twitter. Just love quoting poetry or a line I'm reading, or talking about the TV I'm watching (Columbo needs it) plus find a ton of stuff to read - which I now tend to link on here.

yeah absolutely
actual-quoted-poetry & more specifically just the use of twitter for carrying interesting language fragments is totally key, like a real pleasure of it

I think wanting to produce speech is a natural part of human existence and twitter gives a space to that instead of forcing yourself to find someone in particular (or even a message board or specific thread!) to produce that speech to

Dud

i just avoid it because i've already reached my "douchebag on the internet i don't actually know at all" quotient

i meant "person" not "douchebag", stupid phone

whoa. yeah, of course, i need to clarify due to the brevity of my post. something i wouldn't be able to do on twitter.

but basically this:

I've gone through phases where I've followed irl friends, ilxors, professional colleagues, weirdos, brands, activists, and I kinda hate the resultant paste.

― cause baby, now we got dad bod (how's life), Friday, May 22, 2015 7:46 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i used twitter a lot a couple of years ago. i know how to tailor it, i know the parody accounts, i know the numbered tweets for longer thoughts, i know the twitpic texts/images, i know the abbreviations, i know the essay-tweets, the many ways people use it, etc.. however, most of the actual words are so nebulous it can refer to anything, given that you cannot put it in context a lot of times, making it hard to have any worthwhile conversation on there. it's usually, "hey, what's your facebook/email" through a direct message--taking the conversation OUT of twitter.

did you guys read that post that said twitter is like a bar? yeah, i agree with that: http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2015/05/12/twitter_is_a_crowded_bar/

schlump, the many facets you speak to do not add enough substance and creates a world where everything is a passing trend. GUYS WHITE COP KILLED BLACK MAN. LOOK AT THIS PERV LOOKING UP THIS GIRLS SKIRT. @BarackObama MONKEY. Where millions of useless tweets ensue. it all dwindles down to jokey one-liners or pithy comments, which, strangely, can only be replied to with "yeah Richard I don't know what to tell you it just isn't really like that". everything becomes prone to misinterpretation on twitter because of the character limits. the only people that have fun with it are those "in the know". that's to say, people who share a dialect that is abbreviated yet understood by only those in a clique or small circle. like you say, it takes an understanding of that language or situation outside of twitter. i have to know what is going on outside to understand twitter, but then what is the purpose of twitter?

the best use of twitter, for me, is as a piece of art, such as this account: https://twitter.com/permudat

but most don't use twitter optimally given its constraints. and notice i never said "no constraints". twitter enforces a character-limit, which i don't like. but that doesn't mean i like no constraints. it's like saying i don't like formal verse poetry and thinking this means i like blank verse that has no constraints. that's just silly, since even blank verse has its own self-inflicted constraints.

i mean there are skilled communicators writing of all kinds of great & diverse stuff on twitter 24/7, if you choose to disregard that in favor of a blinkered judgement against the form, well that's on you imho

― gwyneth anger (patron sailor), Friday, May 22, 2015 8:14 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

please provide some examples

you can also tweet links to longer pieces of writing that can't be condensed! imagine that

also people regularly post screenshots of text to get around the character limit

― gwyneth anger (patron sailor), Friday, May 22, 2015 8:20 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you said it. those pieces are OUTSIDE of twitter.

your response to "there are good writers on twitter" is "prove it"? lol

you're right tho, twitter is probably not the place for people who feel the need to exhaustively explain themselves

i think it's fair to say the format of twitter does not encourage complex, sustained thought. it doesn't have to mean that it is contributing to the decline of civilization or that there aren't people who use it smart ways or w/e.

fwiw the majority of times i am referenced to twitter by someone it invariably involves a celebrity of some kind. except for the times when an activist type links me to a really great marginalized voice i wouldn't have heard if it wasn't for twitter. so idk.

but then the latter are usually in the form of blog posts. twitter seems good at the networking / sourcing part.

∞ - really avoided all the stuff you are describing somehow.

Every now and then come across someone who I think should be on ilx, but isn't, so I get to read 'em in this form. Again its fine.

You talkin about Dom?

guys lets all try to appreciate that (∞) saw some bad tweets and that is tuff

also people regularly post screenshots of text to get around the character limit

― gwyneth anger (patron sailor), Friday, May 22, 2015 8:20 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you said it. those pieces are OUTSIDE of twitter.

― F♯ A♯ (∞), Friday, May 22, 2015 6:13 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

feel like this platform just might be beyond what youre capable of understading

∞ wants a ∞ character limit

i suspect ∞ has never actually used twitter

schlump, the many facets you speak to do not add enough substance and creates a world where everything is a passing trend. GUYS WHITE COP KILLED BLACK MAN. LOOK AT THIS PERV LOOKING UP THIS GIRLS SKIRT. @BarackObama MONKEY. Where millions of useless tweets ensue.

― F♯ A♯ (∞), Friday, May 22, 2015 6:11 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

like does he realize that you can choose who to follow, is he following racist upskirt accounts

i suspect his profile pic is the egg xp

is twitter bad because somewhere on it there is a racist upskirt tweet, is twitter subject to the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine, do you have to have any understanding of the actual functionality of the platform before concocting dismissive theories about why its bad

twitter the company is bad because they don't pay attention to the really bad tweets that are targeted at ppl

twitter is good though

twitters abuse moderation policy is very bad

ty for the reply ∞
i still feel like you are setting a weird standard twitter doesn’t have to meet to be useful, though. like it doesn’t have to be a complete ecosystem. if it’s an inherently insubstantial medium that has to lean on other things to be able to support complexity, that’s still okay. if you get to a stage of dming somebody to ask their e-mail, it still played a part in that conversation, twitter as part of a healthy diet. if there’s a necessarily convoluted strand of conversation it can’t easily accommodate, it’s akin to all other specific strands of interaction; dynamically more suited than some things than others, the same way talking in groups is different from talking one-on-one or writing an e-mail’s different to writing a letter. really, though, i still kind of dispute that; even if space limitations restrict rebuttals, publicity and transparency and reach and democracy aid them, improve them, & this is still a net plus in what the medium is doing to help me understand stuff (five discrete points instead of one comprehensively stated point, say).

& yeah i mean the short attention span/everything is a passing trend thing just isn’t twitter, i don’t think. it’s just the world. it would have been as salient a criticism of any other mechanism for relaying information ever, tv news frothier than newspaper writing. it is a like a long now critique of snapchat. there is always going to be a vast quantity of meaningless everything, & anything so quintessentially abundant obviously at least offers you the option of exposing yourself to just firehose-intensity everythingness. but i don’t think everything’s prone to misinterpretation just because it’s succinct, or if it is then those pedantic corrections are at least sometimes useful, a venue where fairly standard boilerplate absolutes are more publicly punctured, pithily & meaningfully) (i was trying to link, here, to somebody tweeting some reporter who'd asked how a list of white writers editors might hire would go down politically, somebody-but-i-can’t-find-who describing this as “a masthead”; can anyone remember where this is).

& i don’t know if it’s cliquey or not. i remember ryan talking bout it being unusual among social networks in exposing users to how good they were at it, like in its content being contextless in a meaningful way, where good things without stature could grow. & yeah like most anything maybe doesn’t use its constraints well, but i don’t know, my feed is the full of engaging stuff that does & things that don’t need to to be valuable. it's so useful.

Can't be bothered with twitter or infinity but I feel like twitter is mostly shit surely because aphoristic content is the hardest to do well (cf [shade redacted]) but the good stuff will be v good

like every dislikable band surely the problem is the fans

I hate Twitter bc it is addictive and somehow never filling; it (like social media broadly) ruined the output of a lot of great and smart bloggers/writers; it magnifies petty understandings and career anxiety; performative tweeting has become a way of getting work that gives the illusion of depth while offering very little; because few regular folks can understand it which is negatively shaping the writing Twitter power users create; because important conversations are lost or forgotten bc of the ephemeral nature of the medium; etc

Otoh it has undoubtedly been responsible for advanced networking linkedin could only dream of, and obv supporting positive social movements like blacklivesmatter