Tweeting from the Edge

In the Summer of 2010, my family and I went to stay in a holiday camp in Riennes, France, where we took day trips to Paris, Disneyland, and watched drunk, angry English men fight in a bar after their country failed to advance from the final sixteen of the South Africa World Cup.

It was also the Summer I got a phone and joined Twitter.

I was twelve years old then. I am twenty-four years old now.

I have spent fifty percent of my life on a social media platform that to many, is more toxic than nuclear waste, but at that moment in time, was seen as something hopeful, something that would change the world. And it has. But not in the way people were expecting during the Arab Spring. It has not, as many naively believed, brought down authoritarian regimes in the Middle East or a new age of transparency to political discourse.

It has undoubtedly helped when it comes to activism and holding those in power accountable (and dare I say it, a trickle of transparency, Twitter has ended careers). And I personally have learned so much from people with differing viewpoints while political loitering there. My understanding of class, feminism, and intersectionality have only expanded because of Twitter

But it has also brought us a whole swathe of new terms to grapple with. Misinformation, disinformation, fake news, online echo chambers.

Despite its comparatively few regular users to Instagram or even Facebook, the news cycle is born and shaped on Twitter. Stories are broken there before hitting the newspaper front pages and the conversation spawning from these stories in radio segments and in opinion columns are often started there too.

It was so exciting in the beginning, the intimacy of it, a direct connection to anyone else with an account, no matter who they were, before every vague celebrity had a social media manager. But that could never last. Now we get day after day of inane “discourse”, where people tweet and subtweet and pile on whomever has taken an opposing view on what his appropriate for an Irish person to call their mother (the mom, mum, mam, of it all, I shudder thinking about it) or how many types of potato are appropriate to eat on with your dinner on Christmas Day.

Much has been written about the demise of Twitter over the past few weeks and months. But for what it’s worth, I don’t think Twitter is going anywhere. Things like that don’t happen to certified space gremlins like Elon Musk. Elon has managed to survive slandering a man who saved children trapped in a flooding cave as a “pedo guy”, spread various forms of right-wing conspiracies from is allegedly libertarian pulpit and of course, treating workers at Tesla, and now Twitter with nothing but disdain. When you have that much money, it will take far more than that to lose your power.

Twitter is also not going anywhere because of people like me. Scrolling through Twitter is the first thing I do when I wake up and the last thing I do before falling asleep. I do it when I’m bored, I scroll through it when I’m busy. I would have finished this piece weeks ago if I wasn’t reading in depth Twitter threads about idiosyncrasies in American politics and the BBC gameshow, ‘The Traitors’. My friends and I often communicate through memes and tweets, sending them back and forth several times a day. The more outrageous the better. There is not a shadow of a doubt that Twitter has permanently rotted my brain. I don’t need hard drugs when I’ve got the often funny and always unhinged musings of total strangers on the internet.

Even in the last year, it has been because I was scrolling on Twitter rather than doing my actual work that I was able to look across my bank of desks in the office and tell my very English colleagues “Not to be the barer of bad news but I think the Queen is dead”, after reading that something very strange had just happened in the house of commons. This was about 6 hours before Huw Edwards officially broke the news on the BBC.

Twitter is chaotic. There is no other place on the internet where you can flit between reading completely bad faith arguments over how Oscar Wilde was homophobic immediately before a meme of Homer Simpson or a parody of a politician that some angry man in the replies is convinced is real. And honestly, that’s why I’m still on it, despite all Elon’s shenanigans.

Twitter can be a hellish place and bring out the worst in us, there is no denying that. But I was raised there, and I think I am staying put.

(Photo: Andreas Eldh on Flickr, via Creative Commons)