Twitter is the human condition

The good and bad things about Twitter are the joys and pains of society

There is something visceral about Twitter: something intrinsically human or even animal in its sociality. It’s inherently political: dangerous, unsettling; necessary.

It has its pitfalls including significant reputational risks. But if you want to be a part of public conversation nowadays, Twitter is pretty much indispensable. If you are on the outside looking in, it’s a way to get your foot in the door, get noticed and find some sort of niche. If you are an insider looking out, it’s a way to project your power directly, to mobilise allies and defend your position against those who wish to unseat you and what you represent.

Here is the visceral nature of Twitter. Though Twitter discourse takes place mostly through the medium of language and argument, the currency of power is always bubbling around it: the ability to mobilise and to put pressure on others, including the institutions of state. The tweets that get the most likes and retweets are not those which say the most interesting things or offer the most telling insights, but those that serve a purpose, that appeal readily, that tell people what they want to hear, that confirm existing prejudices in familiar language. This is what helps form (and re-form) the group. The less thought and reflection required from the receiver the better.

Hot-takes and echo chambers

The ‘hot-take’ is partly an out-growth of Twitter as a political space like this. It’s more or less the same as the old ‘sound-bite’. It’s the sort of thing that political parties try to press on to us to get their message across as quickly as possible. It’s what effective newspaper headlines or cartoons do: coming up a pithy phrase or an image that sums up an event or situation in a concise manner, enough to make us go ‘Ha!’ Via Twitter, we can all do it and get an audience for our efforts. As a result, pretty much everyone with an agenda is at it, with various degrees of originality ranging from limited to non-existent.

This lack of originality is actually an advantage in political life, for it exploits familiarity. Marketing people, advertisers and political consultants have long understood that getting people to like your thing means making them internalise your messaging and framing of what matters. This requires repetition, repetition and more repetition. ‘Take Back Control’; ‘Boris Johnson is a Liar’; repetition wins politics and repetition wins Twitter.

I may sound somewhat contemptuous about all this, but moaning about it is like moaning about the rain falling. This is just life and politics. I think anyone who is active on Twitter will feel the pressure to be like this. Through the constant feedback of likes and retweets, we find that our most popular utterances are those which are least original and most repetitious. People like familiarity. Even the embrace of originality thrives off of it (so, off unoriginality). Whether we think about it consciously or not, we come to anticipate how others might respond well to us and then tailor our tweeting to get that positive result.

And this is how Twitter’s notorious ‘echo chambers’ arise. Basically we find a way of communicating that others respond well to – including by liking and retweeting them - and then we proceed to communicate with each other in this mutually gratifying manner. It’s call-and-response: I make the call anticipating a positive response; then when I get it, I’m a part of things: a valued member of a community.

This helps to develop a strong sense of collective identity, which we can see in the various tribes of Twitter. However it needs to be renewed daily, otherwise it will vanish. This establishes a need to find a degree of variety in the uniformity of group reproduction. And this is where our enemies come in. They provide a constant stream of things to object to, to help us renew our group membership. They do this by helping to define the borders of the group, establishing the taboos and folk devils which define outsiderhood - like Emmanuel Goldstein in 1984 and Boris Johnson for the liberal-left now. Even ‘no borders’ progressives need to establish borders. By objecting to borders and national identity, they establish the borders and distinctions of their own identity. We define ourselves largely against what we are not. By defining group outsiders, we clarify what it means to be an insider.

Human all too human

In this way we might see how power is always present in communication. We can sense its presence, the more so the more attuned we are to the world around us, even though we cannot reach out and touch it. We can sense when we are taking a risk with how we communicate, at least with those we know well. Sometimes we may communicate deliberately in a way which will create a split with those who are normally allied to us. However that pull of the group is always there, acting on us, pulling us towards some types of assertion and away from others, whatever their truth or otherwise.

This is the stuff of existence, of whether we even exist for others if we don’t show approval (on Twitter the ‘like’), promote (retweet) and explain where we stand – especially who we stand with. The urge to be heard, to be liked and promoted by others is the urge to exist in a social world. You might call it vanity, but I think we all have it. It’s the same instinct that animals show when they follow us around or join together in a gaggle or herd.

For those who are quite lonely in their normal lives social media appears to have a particular draw. It holds out the possibility that we might find a bit of what we have not found elsewhere: dragging us from isolation into the vortex of humanity - for better and for worse. However, I think it most attracts those who both have time on their hands and a strong will to power: to the unsuccessful but entitled: ME, ME, WHAT ABOUT ME?

All this gives rise to some pretty strange but normal behaviour in which I think we can glimpse the human condition.

As I recall it, in my early days on Twitter in the early 2010s when I had a handful of followers, replies to my tweets were generally genuine engagements with me. However, nowadays this seems a lot rarer, generally coming only from those who I have been with on the platform almost since the beginning. 

People tell you stuff in their replies that they know you already know or that they have told you many times before. In this respect, in replying they aren’t really replying to you or initiating a conversation but rather hitching a ride on what you’ve said, maybe scouting for attention from elsewhere. It’s that thing of making assertions at someone rather than talking with them which I find disconcerting. But then I’ve done it myself – invariably when I’m feeling the need to project myself, to become a little bigger and more important than I feel I am. If your hot takes aren’t getting the praise that they deserve then you may feel the need to start pressing them on to others.

Maybe I’m a little cranky and old-fashioned, but this sort of thing offends against my idea of etiquette. No doubt though it’s classic human behaviour, a bit like when someone elbows their way into a conversation, or when someone raises their voice when talking to you so that others might hear. It’s exploiting the conversational situation to do something else.

Twitter as *a good thing*, mostly

From older people who are not on social media, I sometimes hear dismissals like, ‘It’s all people telling you what they had for breakfast, what’s the point of that?’ No doubt they have a point, especially about Facebook, but sometimes you quite like hearing what someone had for breakfast (even better is seeing it, especially if it’s a full English). Likewise sometimes it’s nice to see someone’s cat looking out of the window, their daughter encountering snow for the first time and their thoughts on the latest episode of whatever thing on TV I can’t be bothered to watch.

What’s For Dinner? @WHATSFORDlNNER

Full English Breakfast

The mundane and banal is part of Twitter’s charm, as it is part of life’s charm. Twitter also offers a chance to follow your interests and find people who share them - immediately. That’s a pretty good thing. OK, so Twitter has helped facilitate some rather awful and powerful gatherings – the one that immediately comes to mind for me is #FBPE - but there are others across the political spectrum. However, again this is just politics. Twitter enables us to do politics for better or worse, to gather and talk and develop our thoughts and activities together. For those of us who are not fans of the progressive technocratic post-political consensus, it has offered us a chance to find others of a similar disposition who previously had no idea each other existed. I know quite a few pro-Brexit folk are awful, but finding the many good ones has been a real pleasure and privilege.

By saying that power is always present in communication I do not mean that all assertion and communication is a function of power: that it is essentially meaningless in and for itself. Indeed I tend to think that the extent to which communication (talking, writing, music-making, art etc) has a meaning of its own is a measure of the extent to which our civilisation is worth cherishing and protecting.

I think the good and bad things about Twitter are more or less the joys and pains of sociality and politics; of society and community; not least the way that these things have boundaries; so insiders and outsiders. We herd together because that is what human animals do, to be something and part of something, to exist. Twitter aids this. Its genius is the way it plugs us straight into the human condition.