How has Granit Xhaka come to anchor and elevate this Arsenal team after six so-so seasons in it? A teenage tactics nut in Des Moines can explain in 280 characters. What is an original but plausible thought about Xi Jinping? A China hobbyist, on a lunch break at a bank, will tweet a thread’s worth of them.
So no, Twitter isn’t vapid. Nor are the other criticisms of it much fairer. There are some spiteful users, true, but the taunts of strangers, if not threatening, should be water off a duck’s back. It is a font of misinformation, yes, but the demand for fake news — that is, human credulity — is more troubling than its supply.
Why, then, did I quit? Why have I encouraged others to follow, regardless of the owner? Years passed before I could define the answer in clear terms.
The site reeks of low status. And not because it is free. Much of Twitter is conducted in a certain voice, or what might be called a home key. Some would describe it as “twee” or “beta” but it is easier to cite examples than to name it. Here are a few. Quaint bios (“tea enthusiast”). Cultural references to the science-fiction or superhero genres. Self-mockery about bad dates and social awkwardness. Jargon (“performative”, “gaslighting”) that people with a healthy distance from politics don’t use or understand.
The site is often likened to a town square but evokes more closely a pub on quiz night. There is that sense of people finding camaraderie in having no better options. There is some sublime humour on there. But it is the humour of consolation.
Instagrammers are teased for their pouting selfies and try-hard glamour. LinkedIn users are difficult to take seriously in all their bumptiousness. But both groups intuit something about life that is often lost on more outwardly intellectual Tweeters: projecting success, even where it doesn’t exist, can work. Swagger can be self-fulfilling.
Twitter doesn’t swagger. Its gait is an ironic shuffle. Well, here is the thing about irony: it gets nothing done. There is no one trait that links all the high performers — in sport, art, politics, commerce — that I have had occasion to meet. But the nearest thing is a slightly humourless amour propre. It is the kind of personality that gets short shrift on Twitter, which is part of the site’s charm but also what leaves it with an anti-aspirational feel. Think of the professions that set the tone of the site: journalists, comedians. These are narrators of events, not initiators of them. “The elite don’t tweet,” I want to say, but some of them do, including its new owner. It just happens to cheapen them.
There isn’t even the consolation that ironic self-effacement is a sign of good and modest character. It often indicates the opposite. Orson Welles once went on a violent rant about Woody Allen, whose timidity he saw as a species of arrogance. (A self-mocker, after all, is still talking about their favourite subject.) There is such a thing as ostentatious humility, and it is all over Twitter.
It won’t save your reputation that you yourself don’t tweet the twee stuff. You will be tainted by association on a platform where 812,000 people follow someone pretending to be the Downing Street cat. What is worse, you might join them over time. Prolonged social media use is mind-shaping. You can, I am convinced, “catch” a certain kind of personality from Twitter. I am convinced it was happening to me.
This is the reason to quit: not the nastiness, but almost the opposite. Twitter is a comfort zone. It makes you feel all right about not pushing for more in life. There is lots of approval to be had on there. So you ignore that it is coming from men who are having Marvel vs DC debates in their forties. All the peer pressure is to be a passive mocker of things, including yourself. So you affect that tone, until it becomes your personality. The site’s reigning atmosphere of domestic mediocrity sucks you in until, one night, you “curl up” in front of a TV series and live-tweet it. Critics of Elon Musk say that selling the right to a blue tick will make Twitter uncool. Make it uncool?
janan.ganesh@ft.com
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