Waving Through a Window: on Twitter
I’m leaving* Twitter. Let me convince myself that I’m doing the right thing.
When I first became aware of rumours that the richest person in the world was hoping to buy my community’s best surrogate for a public square, I thought: if that happens, I’ll finally leave. So when it did, my first reaction (besides, perhaps, that familiar nausea whenever such fictional amounts of money are thrown around like that) was… relief. For a good long while now, Twitter has made me miserable, and here was a useful external excuse to get out.
Of course, over the following days the complicating factors started to creep back in. I snuck onto the site to continue conversations with friends and colleagues in my DMs. I saw people pointing out that in our precarious gig economy a resource like Twitter is all but required. And I found myself thinking: if I can finish making this dress by the time The Great British Sewing Bee airs then I can tag them in a tweet about it, and maybe they’ll notice me…
*So, naturally, I’m chickening out of the clean break. I won’t (yet) deactivate my account; you know, in case of emergencies. But I have left details on how else to contact me, logged out, deleted the app from my phone and the bookmark from my browser, and am moving forward with the best intentions of breaking this 13-year habit.
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Before I go further: I don’t mean to be prescriptive. This is just me and my messy feelings. I know many millions of people still see more advantages than ills to be found on Twitter, so if you want to network at Elon Musk’s house party then you do you.
After all, daring to tear my eyes away from the endless scroll means that I will, inevitably, miss out! I won’t see people announcing their personal and professional news, or retweets that introduce me to new ideas and perspectives, or breadcrumbs to follow in the hope it might lead to some nourishing work. I’ll lose the ability to ask a question of thousands of people at once, and to discharge thoughts too inane to text to a friend, and to call out those who’ve wronged me and the people I care about.
The other day, a BBC radio producer sent me a DM to ask if I could hop on the air in the next 30 minutes to discuss video games in the wake of the BAFTAs. That might not have happened if I wasn’t on Twitter! Then again, I didn’t get paid for that, so maybe I could do with being slightly less accessible. In a world where I’ve started to open my email inbox only once or twice a day, why give people the expectation that they can grab my attention any time they want?
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Time-pressed producers are hardly my biggest problem here. One of the main drawbacks to the kind of accessibility that Twitter offers is the oft-discussed parasocial relationship, if that’s the right term for men I’ve never met talking at me about my breasts and feet. Yes, strangers can use Twitter to tell me they like my podcast (though, you know, a review on Apple Podcasts would probably be more useful), but they can also say all sorts of far less pleasant things.
And despite my deep-rooted desire to somehow fill a lifelong hole in my heart by convincing people to like me, I actually don’t feel good about the way my asymmetrical relationship with my audience is expressed on social media. This is the age of the personal brand, of trying to build a following and look employable, especially for freelancers like me. An agent once told me that if I wanted the opportunity to do a particular kind of work, I ought to just start making my own thing in my own time and share it on Twitter. She liked my tweets, she said; they were funny. But no one is paying me to make my own thing or to write funny tweets. Twitter is the ultimate unpaid work for exposure.
Besides which, Twitter (or at least my corner of it) seems much less inclined to engage with the work I share than with pictures of myself or my increasingly comparatively rare comments on the discourse du jour. As the pandemic whittled away at promising opportunities, I found myself seeking relevance (or at least the appearance of such) on social media, sharing selfies and steadily losing my self.
But hey, I’ve got a following. And isn’t that what it’s all about? Podcast publishers only want celebrity hosts these days. And when the video games industry puts on an event, Twitter is its rolodex. She who tweets, eats, and I do think this system can benefit those who have historically been underrepresented, though perhaps only those with the confidence to send out daily reminders of what their face looks like. Maybe it’s marginally better than the people with hiring power falling back on the guys they knew from school, but I long for a secret third option that offers opportunities not for personal connections or public profile but for skill.
I’m so tired of hoping that some small portion of the people who glance at my tweets as they scroll past might deign to actually click a link, and of pretending to be someone I’m not so that a numbers guy might feel comfortable employing me. More broadly, I’m tired of chasing fulfilment through novelty in my career, and have been trying quite hard to find it elsewhere: in hobbies and home and family and friends.
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So what of my friends? Twitter has certainly helped me to find them, and it’s a convenient way to keep track of their activities. But then, if my tweets don’t reflect my real self then theirs probably don’t either. There are whole huge aspects of my life I barely share online: my family, my love life, my mental health…
That’s not really a problem for those friends I can talk to elsewhere, in person or via text. But I’ve had introverted friends who often lack the energy to reply to texts rely instead on what they’ve seen me tweet (or not), which is rarely representative of my actual current state. And on the other end of the spectrum, it makes me deeply uncomfortable to know that people who very much are not a part of my life can use what I feel obligated to share on my publicly available profile to pretend that they are.
So I won’t mind losing that. But I do worry about being forgotten by people I do care about. I struggle with what you might call a kind of object permanence, often convinced that when I’m not in the room with someone they immediately forget I exist, so I genuinely expect that to happen for a lot of people when they stop seeing my tweets. But I think this sloppy method of staying in touch is a poor substitute for real connection.
I grew up with seven siblings, so I get the need for social noise to drown out the loneliness. But spending all day staring at Twitter feels like sitting in separate houses on the same street, waving through a window. We can glimpse a portion of other people’s lives, and curate what they can glimpse of ours, but we spend such an inordinate amount of our time there, stuck in between stepping outside to actually interact or stepping away to focus on other things.
And that window onto the street isn’t a window onto the world. I know it’s important to stay informed, but I also know that what the most vocal of my curated selection of friends and strangers choose to prioritise isn’t everything. I’m not even talking about being in a political bubble, but the stories unshared, the nuance lost, even just the people who don’t tweet, or at least not in my timezone.
How often have I found myself relying on Twitter instead of reading the actual news, letting my feed of 500 people set the agenda for what I say and do, monitoring the cycle of discourse and backlash to see where the chips fall? I resent the amount of importance we place on what is posted on twitter.com, where people fire off a quick thought they had on the loo only to find themselves spending the day having fervent arguments with strangers.
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Twitter has felt so important to me for such a scarily long time. I generally pride myself on my willpower, but I kind of hope that I am addicted, that I only THINK I need it, and that once I uproot this deeply uncomfortable habit I will be happier and healthier. Someone I know compared my decision to stop using Twitter to the climate-conscious decision to stop using a car. It might be inconvenient, but it feels increasingly necessary. But hopefully increasingly doable too?
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If you’re one of the people who’ll miss the ability to fav pics of my face, you can still find that and pictures of food and clothes I’ve made over on Instagram. For synchronous chat, your best bet is Twitch. Check my schedule for when I’m live, and subscribe for access to the Discord. I keep my website updated with professional news, and will try to make more of an effort to share updates on LinkedIn. And if you have paid work to offer me, please go ahead and send me an email. Thank you for reading! Please don’t forget I exist!