{"id":14544,"date":"2023-04-20T06:25:16","date_gmt":"2023-04-20T13:25:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=14544"},"modified":"2023-04-25T03:55:39","modified_gmt":"2023-04-25T10:55:39","slug":"issue-of-the-week-personal-growth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=14544","title":{"rendered":"Issue of the Week: Personal Growth"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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What Was Twitter, Anyway<\/em>?, The New York Times Magazine, April 23, 2023
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For a long time now, we’ve been describing much of social media as the antonym of personal growth. Scientifically proven by many studies basically. And so, even though we are a media\/information\/internet based organization in many ways, we have generally eschewed it and exposed it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like everything else revolutionary, after the imagining followed by the wrenching reality, over time it will become integrated into a healthier more balanced context. Or it will eat our brains and souls. (It’s doing both now, everything like this is a process.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The question is when and whether the former will overcome the latter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The epicenter of this process has for some time now arguably been Twitter, although the usual suspects of competitors for this distinction hardly need mention. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there’s something about Twitter<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As it appears to be falling from it’s heights into perhaps fatal disrepair, the original promise, the “something about” generally unexamined aspects, and the damage, especially the damage, have never been better examined or explained as in the upcoming Sunday New York Times Magazine (yep, there we go again, but as we’ve explained, in a world where the Twitters and other social media and the internet in general and the increasing entertainment dumbing-down over substance of television for decades have increasingly destroyed print journalism–with notable exceptions to all the above, the best is wherever you find it, and it’s often here.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the first post in our series The End Of Civilization As We Knew It<\/a><\/em>, we wrote:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the years, in the previous system of the site (still in transition) for the Issue of the Week and Message of the Day, links in the text were not an option. One or two key links were provided at the end of the posts. This became purposeful, as troglodyte as it may have appeared. Activism on the internet, which we were part of pioneering, evolved, or devolved, with the internet itself. That is going to be a subject focused on more itself in the future. But for now, keep in mind that it was purposeful for us to require the reader to read, not jump around with links. It\u2019s understandable that in view of getting an audience, most have used every new gimmick the internet has to offer. But studies have proven the downside of this, and many internet pioneers now decry their own creation.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Twitter, for instance, has now been made infamous. We understand why many use it and see it as needed. Just as we see it as the fact of what it is\u2014the shrinking capacity, reinforced by the very use of it, to focus on more than a few characters\u2014making, as we\u2019ve previously noted, the 30 second TV spot seem like reading volumes. The 30 second TV ad that was the metaphor yesterday for the shrinking capacity and willingness of the species to think longer than that.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The article makes the case that Twitter has transformed the world in ways we barely understand, a platform that in the end is a kind of simplistic addictive illusion in the extreme.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here it is:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Credit…Photograph by Jamie Chung. Concept by Pablo Delcan. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

“What Was Twitter, Anyway?”<\/a>, By Willy Staley, April 23, 2023, The New York Times Magazine<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whether the platform is dying or not, it\u2019s time to reckon with how exactly it broke our brains.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The trouble began, as it usually does, when I saw something funny on my computer. It was the middle of the morning on a Wednesday, a few years back, and I came across news that Le Creuset, the French cookware brand, had made a line of \u201cStar Wars\u201d-themed pots and pans. There was a roaster made to look like Han Solo frozen in carbonite ($450) and a Dutch oven with Tatooine\u2019s twin suns on it (\u201cOur Dutch oven promises an end result that\u2019s anything but dry \u2014 unlike the sun-scorched lands of Tatooine\u201d; $900). A set of mini cocottes had been decorated to resemble the lovable droid characters C-3PO, R2-D2 and BB-8.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was also looking at Twitter that day, something that I can say for sure not only because of what happened next, but also because I look at Twitter just about every day. (This is not terribly unusual in my profession \u2014 I am an editor at The New York Times Magazine \u2014 but I think it should be stated clearly upfront that I have something of an acute problem with it.) I took a screenshot of the cocottes and uploaded it to the site. I wrote, as an accompanying caption, \u201cThe Star Wars\/Le Creuset pots imply the existence of a Type of Guy I find genuinely unimaginable…\u201d \u2014 just like that, ellipsis and all. I hit send. I guess I went back to work after that. My email records show that I sent a big edit memo to a writer. Then, around lunchtime, things started happening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you don\u2019t use Twitter \u2014 which is perfectly normal; about three-quarters of Americans don\u2019t \u2014 you should know that the platform has a function called quote-tweeting, which was introduced in 2015. It allows users to show a tweet they\u2019ve encountered to their own followers, while adding their own text or image to comment on it. You often see people use this function to respond to some contrived prompt that crosses their feed (\u201cWhat\u2019s a great song that features an impressive horn section?\u201d). Less often, though often enough that the practice has its own name, quote-tweets are used to roast and clown on people \u2014 to trot them out in front of a new audience, drop their pants and spank them. This is referred to as \u201cdunking.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At some point in the early afternoon, someone dunked on me by quote-tweeting my observation and adding, in The Onion\u2019s headline style: \u201cArea Man Has Never Heard of Women.\u201d My post was now in front of a new audience, and that audience was now reading it framed by what I would consider an uncharitable interpretation of my point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

New quote-tweets started to pour in, each one putting me in front of another audience of followers, some minuscule and others quite large. \u201cI enjoyed that this tweet manages to be sexist on multiple levels\u201d; \u201c#newsflash WOMEN cook and like Star Wars\u201d; \u201cImagine a woman\u201d; \u201cHi, have you met women?\u201d; \u201cWomen like Star Wars. Men cook.\u201d; \u201cMy husband is a huge Star Wars fan and is the cook in the house. He bakes too. Sorry to blow your mind.\u201d; \u201ci luv a good dose of homophobia and toxic masculinity in the year of our lord 2019 🙄.\u201d My notifications flooded for the next 24 hours as the tweet continued to find its way into new corners of the site. Some people replied directly: \u201c… are you aware that girls can like star wars too\u201d; \u201cWilly, get a better imagination, and cut it out with the gatekeeping\u201d; \u201cMen cook. Women like Star Wars. If you can\u2019t imagine those things, that\u2019s about you, not other people.\u201d; \u201cShowed my son, he\u2019s trying to find them to order them now. Btw, he\u2019s a Marine.\u201d Other replies can\u2019t be printed here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of these people were wrong<\/em>, exactly. It was true that in the split second between learning of the pots and posting about them, I had imagined a stereotypically geeky and slovenly guy as the customer, and Le Creuset as the kind of thing you put on your wedding registry \u2014 that is indeed why I thought the products were funny. It\u2019s not as if this was a terribly original thought; I didn\u2019t wake up and introduce to our culture, on a random Wednesday, the idea that male nerds like to buy \u201cStar Wars\u201d memorabilia. Nor had these broader gender corollaries \u2014 that men don\u2019t cook, that women don\u2019t like \u201cStar Wars\u201d \u2014 so much as crossed my mind. In any event, I no longer have any trouble imagining what \u201cStar Wars\u201d-Le Creuset customers are like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was wrong on another level, too: The pots and pans were, as many Twitter users would find time to inform me, wildly popular, and are now available only on the secondary market, in some cases for multiple times their retail value. Still, wrong as I may have been, the responses I managed to provoke were stunning to me \u2014 for their volume, their woundedness, their consistency and the way the \u201cStar Wars\u201d-liking issue was so salient that I was called sexist for not<\/em> associating cookware with women. Luckily, the sheer inanity of the topic offered a measure of safety you don\u2019t typically get when you bring negative attention to yourself on Twitter. I could afford to take the anthropological view. I felt like Bill Paxton at the end of \u201cTwister\u201d \u2014 strapped in and able to see down the barrel of this thing and admire its beautiful, treacherous contours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Twitter is both short-form and fast-moving, which together make it feel conversational. Like all conversations, it\u2019s highly context-dependent, and like all good<\/em> conversations, it\u2019s guided by the pleasure principle. That\u2019s what makes it fun: Who doesn\u2019t want to be the person who can make everyone laugh at a dinner party? But Twitter also puts your dinner-party remarks in front of people who were not invited to the dinner party, showing them exactly how little you considered them before chiming in. And, of course, no one involved is having fun at a dinner party at any point in this process; everyone is, like you, probably alone, on the computer, experiencing the feeling we used to know as boredom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though it didn\u2019t feel this way at the time, as I look back now, it\u2019s clear that no one was actually upset<\/em> about the \u201cStar Wars\u201d thing, not in any meaningful sense. A couple of people tried to draw a connection between my retrograde outlook on novelty Dutch ovens and my employer \u2014 always an alarming development \u2014 but mostly it was low-effort clowning that felt charged only because it was traveling along such high-energy vectors (sexism, homophobia, \u201cStar Wars\u201d fandom). The platform can coax this exact sort of response out of its users with an incredibly small amount of effort. It\u2019s only on the receiving end, where all these messages collect in one place, that it feels oppressive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This sort of thing is happening to dozens of people at any moment on Twitter, routinely enough that it\u2019s more than some unfortunate externality, though not so often that you\u2019d say it\u2019s the point<\/em> of the platform. (It, too, has a name: \u201cgetting ratioed.\u201d) You have a few options when this happens. In theory, you can just log out and wait for it to end, but no one does that, because who knows what might happen when you\u2019re not watching. You can go private, which basically ends it, though in a way that looks like admitting defeat. (I did this, briefly, so I could go to sleep that night.) You can delete the tweet, or even delete your whole account. But you can also do what I chose to do the next morning, which is to continue posting about it, because it\u2019s fun, and because it really doesn\u2019t take much effort at all. That\u2019s basically the whole problem right there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This all happened on and around Dec. 4, 2019. Though none of us knew it at the time, a mysterious new respiratory disease had just begun circulating in central China. This would set in motion a spectacular series of events that would make Twitter the focal point of pitched battles about freedom of speech, community health, racial justice and American democracy. At the same time, the pandemic and the federal response to it would create bizarre macroeconomic dynamics that would help one man grow his net worth tenfold<\/em> in two years, transforming him from a high-profile but middle-of-the-pack billionaire into the wealthiest man in human history. For a time, anyway. It appears that Elon Musk was troubled enough by Twitter\u2019s role<\/a> in the discourse battles that he felt he should control it himself, and $44 billion later \u2014 nearly double his entire net worth at the outset of the pandemic \u2014 he has his wish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What exactly have we been doing here for the last decade and a half?<\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Musk has done many things to Twitter, both the app and the business, during his six months as chief executive and owner. He has laid off more than half the staff, changed the interface and functionality of the product and aggressively pushed users to sign up for a paid subscription version of the service. He says that usage has gone up, but because he has taken the company private, we only have his word on that. According to most estimates, ad spending has plummeted. Musk himself has reportedly estimated that the company is now worth about $20 billion, a negative 55 percent return. He has, meanwhile, enlisted a small group of journalists \u2014 many of whom have taken a political journey similar to Musk\u2019s in recent years \u2014 to sift through company emails and Slacks in an effort to reveal overreach on the part of the old regime in its management of the global conversation. They published reams of lightly redacted emails, showing regular correspondence between Twitter\u2019s trust-and-safety team and the F.B.I., and other organs of the state, which apparently spend a considerable amount of time scrutinizing individual Twitter accounts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n