The Unending Exhaustion of Twitter Discourse
For those who are terminally online, the relentless nature of Discourse on social media can be emotionally, mentally, and physically taxing.
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I’m one of those people who has been on Twitter–I refuse to call it X, so let’s get that out of the way right here at the beginning–since very close to the beginning. For several years I didn’t spend all that much time on it, and it was essentially a bit of diversion I might turn to when I was bored or waiting for an appointment. Over the years, I’ve seen it go through a number of changes, going from a sort of “global public square” to a place where, for better or worse, people got a great deal of their news. Of late, however, it seems to have become something particularly vexing and toxic. Now, it’s the place to go if you want to just feel angry and frustrated and annoyed with the world and your place in it. It’s also the place to go if you want to see people just…make stuff up and act as if they are some sort of authority.
I won’t say that all of the problems originated with Elon Musk, but I will say that there has been a notable change in the nature of the collective conversation since he took over. While there has always been a tendency on Twitter for people to proclaim their opinions as if they are fact, these days it’s impossible to sign onto the platform without being inundated with “Discourse,” of one sort or another. There is seemingly no aspect of modern life which is immune from this scourge. Obviously there are the usual suspects: politics (the issue of Israel and Palestine is, you won’t be shocked to hear, one of the hottest of hot-button topics on Twitter)
Given that much of my time is spent perusing Gay Twitter, it’s probably not surprising to find that many of the discourses I get ridiculously invested in involve queer issues. In just the past few weeks I’ve seen Gay Twitter get into a tizzy over whether open relationships are gross (they aren’t, but there’s always some Twitter Gay so desperate to be that day’s main character that he’ll post something saying they are), whether it’s gross to make out with strangers in bars (ditto), and whether people who are Gen X were afraid of coming out as gay (they were). It’s honestly pretty wild to see thousands of people setting their digital hair on fire and spilling gallons of digital ink all over the comments from someone with less than a thousand followers, but that’s the world we live in.
It’s not that I think that people with low follower counts aren’t worthy of engagement, of course. After all, we all have to start somewhere. However, the attention economy is a monstrous machine that gobbles us all up as we claw and scratch at one another–either as individuals or as collectivities–as we try to get more eyeballs. I’m not sure that any of us, whether original posters or engagers, really benefit from desperately seeking attention. After all, the whole point of clickbait is clicks and not genuine engagement. It’s a race to the bottom from which none of us are poised to benefit.
Some of this, I think, would be ameliorated by the reinstatement of the old verification system. Whatever its flaws and however opaque the criteria, at least when you saw a blue check next to someone's name you knew that the person behind it had at least some measure of credibility and noteworthiness. Nowadays, anyone who’s willing to shill out for Musk’s system can gain the coveted blue check, which has come to be as much a badge of dishonor and disgrace as it is prestige. For those of us who have been on the platform for a while, however, the instinct is still to see that little sign and associate it with something worth reading.
The result of all of this is a sense of utter exhaustion. I know I’m not the only one who logs in and immediately begins rolling my eyes at whatever inane Discourse has taken shape on that particular day. It’s not that I look back on some bygone golden age of Twitter, but it is nevertheless true that there was a time when you could at least have a bit of control over who you saw. Now that your feed is cluttered with people you don’t follow–a similar problem afflicts Twitter and Facebook–it’s hard to tell what you might encounter. What was once a means of engaging in meaningful conversations with others has instead become a stifling bewildering cacophony.
All of this begs the question: why do I stay? More to the point: why do I pay attention to what is so obviously click bait? In other words, why do I continue to indulge in my desire to be terminally online?
There are two ways of answering this question: the practical and the philosophical. Practically, Twitter remains one of the key ways that I, as an indie writer, broadcast my work to potential audiences. I realize that this is a bit of a cop-out, particularly since Twitter makes no secret of the fact that it now punishes tweets which contain a link to an outside site. Even so, Twitter is still a better place to publicize my work, at least for the present.
On a more philosophical level, I do sort of feel like it’s my job as a cultural critic–and a queer one at that–to pay attention to what’s happening on social media. As we have repeatedly learned, what starts on Twitter doesn’t stay on there, and it far too frequently bleeds into the real world. If I can do my part to offer a bit of nuance and perspective on the crises of the day, then I consider that a job well done.
As always when I write pieces like this one, I feel a bit stymied as to what to do about the problem. Twitter is what it is, and I doubt that anyone, no matter their influence, can hope to change an entire social media ecosystem. Nevertheless, I think we would all do well to sit back and take a little time off to, as they say, go out and touch grass. It’s not healthy to spend all of one’s day online, and signing off for hours–or even days–at a time is a nice little cure for Twitter exhaustion.
Now I just have to try it.