Do we really live in Tiny Talk Town? The stories of Musk and the people who follow him on Twitter, but don’t lurk
Twitter has broken our brains, yet we cling to these shards and believe each new tweet may be the one that mends our gray matter. Musk, who in a mere 12 days of owning the company, has dissolved the board, laid off half of the staff, and even railed against his own, is the epitome of broken brain syndrome.
“Tiny talk is talk so small it feels like it’s coming from your own mind,” Musk fired off shortly past 10 pm last Thursday, a thought so deep it might have bubbled up from a fish-bowled dorm room. Thank you: We live in a place called Tiny Talk Town, where there is a lot of discussion about Musk.
We don’t need to be in Tiny Talk Town. We know it. There are other places online that can be pretty decent. But Twitter is unique, and its most fervent users are unlikely to leave en masse. And most of the knee-jerk “I’m outta here” reactions to Musk’s takeover aren’t that compelling, unless you’re a writer assigned to collate celebrity tweets. The smarter move could be a slow burn, rather than a fire exit, which is why it’s important to consider it. Think of it as quiet quitting, but for social media.
A small group of people make up the world of TWITTER. Heavy users who use English and generate 90 percent of all global revenue are less than 10 percent of the monthly users.
So active users are a noisy bunch, and it would be easy for, say, an electric car entrepreneur who follows a disproportionate number of extremely active “blue checks” on Twitter to mistake his own Twitter experience for everyone’s experience. (Same goes for journalists.) Almost half of users on the site don’t reply to their originals much, and most of their posts are replies. They check out live sports and celebrity news on TV but then go about their lives. They’re “lurkers.”
Lurking isn’t doomscrolling, a practice (and phrase) that took hold during the early days of the Covid pandemic, when many people found themselves stuck at home and grasping at info on social media. Choosing to sit back and observe for awhile is a simplistic approach to dealing with the complexity and chaos of New Twitter. Check in on Elon Musk’s new toy, sure, then close your app or browser tab. Then disengage when you send a tweets. During basketball games, keep an eye on it. Use DMs if you have to, then direct those message threads elsewhere. Save your most original thoughts for another time, another place.
It is a failure of imagination to think that our choice is the social media platforms we have now or nothing. I keep thinking about something that Robin Sloan, a novelist and former Twitter employee, wrote this year: “There are so many ways people might relate to one another online, so many ways exchange and conviviality might be organized. Look at these screens, this wash of pixels, the liquid potential! The network effect of Twitter still consumes the fuel for other possibilities, even after it got a local maximum.
What Twisted Twitter Can Learn From Quakers? A Conversation with Ambler about Disciple, Decision, and Deliberation in the Quaker Way
Allow me a weird turn here. I became interested this year in how Quakers deliberate. The early to abolitionism, equality between the sexes, and prison reform are just a few of the things that Quakers have done ahead of the moral curve time and again. That is not to say Quakers have gotten nothing wrong, but what has led them to get so much right?
Rex Ambler’s book “The Quaker Way” suggests silence as the answer. In a typical Quaker meeting, Ambler writes, community members “sit in silence together for an hour or so, standing up to speak only if they are led to do so, and then only to share some insight which they sense will be of value to others.” They will wait in silence, again to discern what needs to be done, if they must decide an issue collectively. There is much that debate can offer but much that it can obscure. “To get a clear sense of what is happening in our lives, we Quakers try to go deeper,” he writes. “We have to let go our active and fretful minds in order to do this. We go quiet and let a deeper, more sensitive awareness arise.”
This is powerful because I see it in myself. In the heat of an argument, my whole being is tense and I know how I respond. When there is time for my spirit to settle I know how I process hard questions or difficult emotions after quiet reflection. I know which is my better self.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/11/opinion/what-twitter-can-learn-from-quakers.html
The Art of Divisibility: What Happens if We Learn to Make Decisions in Our Minds Are Most Active and Frustrated?
It is not a good idea to have a long meeting with the philandering group. But there is wisdom here worth mulling. We do not make our best decisions, as individuals or as a collective, when our minds are most active and fretful. The description is as precise as I’ve ever heard for a description of a person on the Internet. With putting us in an active mental state, and knowing that it will affect our mental faculties, Twitter encourages us to fire off statements about divisive topics, always with one eye towards how quickly they will rack up likes and retweets and thus popularize the issue. It is insane.
It will only get worse from here. OpenAI recently released ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence system that can be given requests in plain language (“Write me an argument for the benefits of single-payer health care, in the style of a Taylor Swift song”) and spit out remarkably passable results.