Twitter C/D

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

Performatively tweeting your brand is one of life's gr8 pleasures

I'm not advanced enough for twitter but I enjoy that aspect of (sorry) facebook

Deej what do you mean by few regular folks can understand it

I mean following the path of discussion requires an investment of both time and understanding; really it's a bunch of overlapping communities with their own values and rhetorical approaches, it's not made for a general audience. This is why it's fun / addictive, like ilx on steroids. But it's also like, a lot of important convos happen that only make their way to, like, my mom sitting back home in Illinois via a wack thinkpiece that attempts to translate the conversation via a trolly headline

And the second part of that was that I think a lot of heavy Twitter users who are writers forget that it's their job to communicate with regular ppl who don't spend 12 hours a day on Twitter

It siphons away conversations from our creative output and leaves them as half-realized thoughts that successfully relieves the urge to create and simultaneously produces nothing of value

Feel like those important convos have traditionally taken place in settings even less visible to the average deej's mom than twitter tbh? There are a lot of issues whose prominence seems down to twitter

Can't speak to the latter point I don't read a lot of "pieces" tbh

yah that's true, although I hate Twitter I do not think it's purely a force for evil at all, I think on balance it's actually very ambiguous

apart from gifted aphorists, im tempted to argue that twitter is less a communication platform where "conversations" can happen so much as it is a signaling mechanism for indicating that such conversations are happening somewhere else (and maybe it'll even direct you to them). it's like twitter is less about content or ideas per se than ~awareness~ of ideas/content. in semiotic terms it's very much a "indexical" medium (ie, pointing).

on the other hand making an essentializing claim about any communicational medium is a fool's errand since pushing against their supposed limits and forms is what such mediums do, to a large extent.

maybe it's just my feed though. a good majority of what appears in my timeline includes a link, a picture, etc.

龜 twit renaissance in full bloom

Thanks, d-40, for putting it better than I did. I agree with just about everything you've said.

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

― Keith Mozart (D-40), Saturday, May 23, 2015 6:30 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ryan otm

Schlump, of course you can tailor Twitter to be the most engaging, thought-provoking, and interesting timeline you can think of, but that is not my point.

I am criticising how people generally use Twitter and how it facilitates link-baity headlines and content. Twitter is like eating a bag of chips. So, yes, in short, you and most people are right in saying that Twitter is what you make of it, but the constraints and format (medium) facilitate a type of content that has little depth. It's like saying, "Well, if you like chips we've thought of our customers and have come up with a great vegetable option just for you!" The most pragmatic thing would be to stop eating chips because there are far better options, comparatively.

youre wrong and v obvs uniformed

The most pragmatic thing would be to stop eating chips because there are far better options, comparatively.

I don't think there are, frankly. it's an ideal way for people I know and people I like to direct me to content that I enjoy. that's how I use it anyway.

twitter as junk food is the most common entry level ass face criticism of the medium deduced by people who are sure it just must be that way because well its... short? serious usage of the term clickbait (its clickbait not link-bait fwiw) is a clear signal of lack of engagement with the topic too

Thanks, d-40, for putting it better than I did. I agree with just about everything you've said.

― F♯ A♯ (∞), Wednesday, May 27, 2015 3:27 PM (48 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hes saying a totally different thing than you!

which i disagree with too fwiw, deejs description is m/l accurate if overly negative, but having a power user info network is actually extremely tight