Five Ways I was Wrong About Twitter

Folks it’s been a while since my last post, and it’s Twitter’s fault. Yes, the most absurd social network, the one where if I used its new name “𝕏” you would think I was talking about some ambiguous algebraic variable. I always thought Twitter would be a waste of time, if not downright harmful to my mental health, but well, I dipped my toe in and now I guess I’m swimming. A little less than a year ago, I was at a cafe in Istanbul asking some people I’d just met what “horny on main” meant, and now just the other day I was tweeting the very same phrase in a poem. So without further ado here are five things I believed a year ago that I don’t anymore:

1/5 Everyone is mean on Twitter

You know the reputation: nastiness, brigading, calling out, people losing their jobs over a clumsy joke. I wanted nothing to do with it. But when I heard about a part of the Twitter network which not only has norms against that kind of behavior but actively defends against it, I was intrigued and made an account to see what was going on. The fact that my handle (@yoltartar) is not very catchy reflects how much I expected to throw the account away after a month or two. But what do you know, the people I met online were so friendly that I went to meet them in person, and one thing led to another, and now I have met many dear friends and one lover because of an absurd website. Thanks Twitter!

2/5 Tweets are too short to say anything important

These kids today have no attention span. Back in my day we read books, big fat books with lots of words. I mean you can’t fit wisdom into 280 characters can you? Well okay, Zen koans, sure, but what else? Okay and the Basmala and the Shahada, but… alright, and the Ten Commandments and the Seven Deadly Sins, but… any given entry in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, you say? “Brevity is the soul of wit,” you say? Hmmm.

The more I struggle to pack complex ideas into 280 characters, the more I realize that it takes a much deeper understanding than it does to write a blog post. And then to catch a certain tone, to make it memorable and funny and a little surprising takes a high degree of finesse. It reminds me of song-writing, another discipline that forces me to say a lot with a few words. The challenge energizes me and pushes me to probe deeper into an idea, to choose my words with more care. In short, it’s an addictive medium to write in.

On the reading side, I’m starting to realize that most non-fiction books these days could be summed up with a whole lot less prose, because the bulk of the words in them are there to establish the legitimacy of the idea, to show the extent of the writer’s research, and, of course, to sell a book. Consider one of the sayings that bounces around my part of Twitter: “focus your time and attention on what you want to see more of¹” You could read (or write) a book on this topic, certainly, but you could also just contemplate the many implications and let it change how you live your life.

3/5 It makes no sense

Several months before I actually made a Twitter account, I’d already looked into the scene I’m involved in now, and honestly it made no sense to me. The layout and textual conventions seemed chaotic, and the content itself was packed with unfamiliar vocabulary, slang, abbreviations, and in-jokes. It wasn’t until I befriended the poster known as Maeby (@not_a_hot_girl) at that cafe at Istanbul that I had any reason to believe there was something interesting on the other side of my bewilderment. But once I dived in, it was much easier than learning a foreign language or the manners of a foreign culture, things I already had a little practice with.

Slowly but surely, I picked up the language and the social conventions. And it turns out they aren’t just doing it to be weird; all of it has a purpose. Some purposes are straightforward, like abbreviating to avoid wasting precious characters on formulaic phrases. Others are more subtle, like the use of humor to gently enforce group norms without excluding or belittling anyone.² And the new vocabulary isn’t superfluous; in fact I believe it’s developing a richer palette for describing mental states. For example, “cringe” as in “that was really cringe” is not exactly the same thing as “embarrassing”; to me it describes the experience of taking the perspective of an unsympathetic outside observer and having a viscerally uncomfortable reaction to what was just said or is about to be said. So when my friend Rich says “cringe is the path of awakening,” he suggests that whenever we feel cringe, it’s a sign that we’re trying to avoid making someone uncomfortable. But with each cringe we have to wonder: is this a kindly social instinct or is it a way we’re blocking our full potential for no good reason? You could sit for a long time with that.

I also gradually realized that my literary habits—my precise and fussy use of grammar, capital letters, and punctuation—were somewhat uncool.³ And I think there’s a reason for this too: Twitter is essentially an oral culture in written form. If you study the history of languages, there’s an interplay between oral and written forms: initially, writing simply describes what is being said, but its durability keeps it from changing, and over the years it begins to lag behind, turning first into a more formal register and eventually into a different language. Talking moves fast, books move slow. We associate written culture with legitimacy, but in fact speech has a much deeper claim on us; it’s something like 40 times older than writing. Twitter culture embodies some of the incredible flexibility and nuance of the spoken word. It’s nimble, it’s inclusive, it’s playful, and the only crucial thing is that the message gets through to those who are listening for it.

4/5 It’s all just vanity and self-promotion

These kids today are so self-absorbed, they’re all little narcissists with their selfies and their personal brands and their… what’s that… hinterlander is a personal brand, you say? A personal brand can just be me in all my uniqueness, putting myself out into the world, without faking anything? My hero Walt Whitman would have taken fabulous selfies if he’d had the technology?

I see now that there are many reasons to show myself, and not all of them are about inflating my own ego. Sure there will always be posers and pretentious influencers out there, but sensitive people connect with authenticity, and can smell bullshit and guardedness from a mile away, whether they’re conscious of it or not. That means that exploring the intersection of what I enjoy writing and what people I care about enjoy reading can be a path to what’s most authentic for me and what’s most beneficial for others.

As for selfies, there’s a tremendous amount of information conveyed in them, not just from the face and the expressions on it, but also the surroundings, the framing, the posture, and so on. There are many valuable reasons to convey this kind of information, especially when we can’t be together in person. A few weeks ago someone read my energy through a selfie (with consent), and you know what, why the heck not?

here ya go, a selfie of me that I like a lot

5/5 Memes are stupid

I used to think memes were just mindless entertainment, an infinite scroll of slightly funny triviality to distract us from anything that really matters. But after enjoying and deconstructing some good ones and making a few of my own, I started to realize how powerful they can be. A good meme is just an idea that’s packaged in such a compelling form that it spreads on its own. And sometimes the packaging is slick enough to slip the idea past our hidebound intellectual defenses and straight into our hearts. Great wisdom can be disguised as silliness, and I would much rather see that than its much more insidious counterpart: silliness disguised as great wisdom.

Memes are also a wonderful way to influence group behavior without rules or power-over. They’re an invitation and not a command, and they succeed to the extent that they tickle people’s deepest selves in a pleasant way. A great example came up in conversation the other night. Years ago at the Haw River Learning Celebration, there was this problem of people leaving their dirty dishes lying around everywhere. No amount of cajoling and scolding at morning meetings seemed to help. So my mom got the idea to write a song about it, a catchy song that would stick in people’s heads:

It's grand to wash your own dish,
    wash your own dish for sure
And even better, wash an extra dish,
    wash an extra dish (or more!)
And if you scrub a skillet
    with some crusted-on creation
You'll be a superhero...
    of the Learning Celebration

And guess what, it worked! And it keeps on working to this day because people teach each other the song,⁴ and it’ll probably go on working even after my mom is gone. No rule and no amount of scolding can even touch that level of effectiveness, and it makes people happy at the same time! I believe the song works by tickling the deep part of us that wants to do right by the group, and if it didn’t do this it wouldn’t be a good meme, and so it wouldn’t catch on. This way of doing things is much harder to abuse than a rule imposed by authority figures.

In short: memes are great!

So what’s going on with the blog?

I don’t know yet. My life has changed dramatically in the past few months: I offered my life up to a higher power to use for the benefit of the world, I met amazing people and found a new community, new roles, and a new mission, I fell in love, I began to truly believe in magic, I lost all interest in argumentation and reading or writing at length about philosophical points, and I started spending my writing energy on Twitter. The thing is, I have to drop my bit about being just a keen observer, just a gonzo journalist, because now I’ve gone too deep and become part of the plot. I don’t know how to tell my stories anymore, because they’re complicated with a lot of backstory and context, because they involve people I care about who may not want to be so exposed, and because things happen in them that are hard for me to explain without invoking the so-called supernatural. I’ll give it some thought and try to figure something out, but in the meantime, I will be tweeting.

Much love and courage to all y’all!

1. This originated with Visakan Veerasamy (@visakanv)

2. I’ve read that a similar strategy of teasing to enforce norms developed among indigenous people in the arctic, and my guess is that this has to do with depending on each other for survival so much that open conflict has very high stakes.

3. I’m still using them here because a) it’s a blog, and b) I am not afraid to be uncool; cringe is the path of awakening.

4. There are two more verses after this one, one by my mom and another by our friend Martha. They explain the entire dish-washing system, acting as a singable community instruction manual. The tune is borrowed from some old song but we’ve all forgotten which one because all we can hear to that tune now is the dish-washing song. There are also gestures!