![]() ![]() Tweets appear more meaningful when amplified, and when amplified they inspire more tweets in the same vein. Either way, the nature of Twitter is to assert the importance of tweets. ![]() This supposed newsworthiness can then result in literal news stories, written by journalists and based on inspiration or sourcing from tweets themselves, or it can entail the further spread of a tweet’s message by on-platform engagement, such as likes and quote tweets. And yet, the very existence of tweets about an event can make that event seem newsworthy-by virtue of having garnered tweets. Some of those posts justify further discourse, including news stories. At times, people post to share important and timely information about something happening in their immediate vicinity. The platform is optimized to make the nonevent of its own exaggerated demise seem significant. This is neither press nor paean but just-ugh-painful. A New York Times Style article on journalists’ egress to a Mastodon server included one writer’s invocation of a “trauma bond” with the app. ![]() A journalist-spurred Twitter Space about the supposedly imminent death of Twitter encouraged participants to gaze at navels for three hours ( three hours), reportedly drawing almost 200,000 lost souls across the event horizon of its sticky maw. These posts looked extremely embarrassing to some onlookers even at the time, but even more so when morning came (and then another, and another, and others still) and the tweeters kept a-tweeting. Late last week, for example, a litany of end-of-days tweets fell upon the service, frenzied posters just certain that Musk’s firings would cause the site to literally fail at any minute. In practice, Twitter is more like an asylum, inmates screaming at everyone and no one in particular, histrionics displacing reason, posters posting at all costs because posting is all that is possible. The bedlam of Twitter, fused with the brevity of its form, offers an interpretation of the virtual town square as a bustling, modernist city.Īt least in theory. Back in 2006, when the service first launched, it even boasted a public timeline, in which a stream of all tweets was visible by anyone, whether they followed the tweeter or not. Twitter has, since its start, embraced the sublime disorder of many voices speaking over one another. Twitter feels important because it appears to represent a cross section of all voices speaking all at once for everyone, a representative democracy of one-liners. The community of professionals whose job and privilege it is to communicate urgent events and ideas to the public from august and storied platforms such as this magazine have massively overcompensated, mistaking Twitter’s importance to them for its importance in general. Twitter teeters on the edge Musk orders coders to HQ A timeline of Elon Musk’s takeover Twitter death watch captivates millions.ĭoes it “captivate millions” though? I’m going to try to be honest with you here: We, the media, are giving Twitter more credence than it deserves. Soon, nearly every tweet by Musk produced its own news story, as outlets followed the chaos live. The media, who tweet as if their lives depend on it, were already concerned that Musk’s antics might kill off the service, which has offered them both easy access to reporting and a valuable platform for professional attention. Musk’s role seems to oscillate between Stalin and Paul Blart, mall cop, severe reprisal giving way to cringey oafishness and back again.Īll throughout, others tweeted nearby. He fired half the staff, then called some of them back and demanded oaths of fealty from them, perhaps in violation of labor law. He resurrected the once-suspended account of Donald Trump (and of Kanye West, The Babylon Bee, and others). At the very least, he is upending it, wreaking havoc on the company that makes the tweet-tweeting software. Elon Musk, a prolific tweeter and also the richest man in the world despite losing $100 billion this year, might be single-handedly destroying a major social-media platform. Yes, look, okay, there are actual stakes here. Woe, Musk is ruining Twitter! The service will collapse! It’s sure to grind to a halt any day now! Where will we go next? Some are even calling the exfiltration to platforms such as Mastodon (a bewildering perplexity), Hive (a CIA front?), and Post (what even is this?) a search for “ lifeboats.” The result is super embarrassing and even profoundly shameful. Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, whose users sometimes call it a “hellsite,” tweeters have been tweeting in panic mode, as if from an aircraft about to careen into a mountainside. We are living through the most Twittery moment of all time. ![]()
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