What Do We Lose If We Lose Twitter? - The Atlantic - 0 views
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What do we lose if we lose Twitter?
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At its best, Twitter can still provide that magic of discovering a niche expert or elevating a necessary, insurgent voice, but there is far more noise than signal. Plenty of those overenthusiastic voices, brilliant thinkers, and influential accounts have burned out on culture-warring, or have been harassed off the site or into lurking.
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Twitter is, by some standards, a niche platform, far smaller than Facebook or Instagram or TikTok. The internet will evolve or mutate around a need for it. I am aware that all of us who can’t quit the site will simply move on when we have to.
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Perhaps the best example of what Twitter offers now—and what we stand to gain or lose from its demise—is illustrated by the path charted by public-health officials, epidemiologists, doctors, and nurses over the past three years.
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They offered guidance that a flailing government response was too slow to provide, and helped cobble together an epidemiological picture of infections and case counts. At a moment when people were terrified and looking for any information at all, Twitter seemed to offer a steady stream of knowledgeable, diligent experts.
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But Twitter does another thing quite well, and that’s crushing users with the pressures of algorithmic rewards and all of the risks, exposure, and toxicity that come with virality
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t imagining a world without it can feel impossible. What do our politics look like without the strange feedback loop of a Twitter-addled political press and a class of lawmakers that seems to govern more via shitposting than by legislation
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What happens if the media lose what the writer Max Read recently described as a “way of representing reality, and locating yourself within it”? The answer is probably messy.
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here’s the worry that, absent a distributed central nervous system like Twitter, “the collective worldview of the ‘media’ would instead be over-shaped, from the top down, by the experiences and biases of wealthy publishers, careerist editors, self-loathing journalists, and canny operators operating in relatively closed social and professional circles.”
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many of the most hyperactive, influential twitterati (cringe) of the mid-2010s have built up large audiences and only broadcast now: They don’t read their mentions, and they rarely engage. In private conversations, some of those people have expressed a desire to see Musk torpedo the site and put a legion of posters out of their misery.
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Many of the past decade’s most polarizing and influential figures—people such as Donald Trump and Musk himself, who captured attention, accumulated power, and fractured parts of our public consciousness—were also the ones who were thought to be “good” at using the website.
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the effects of Twitter’s chief innovation—its character limit—on our understanding of language, nuance, and even truth.
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“These days, it seems like we are having languages imposed on us,” he said. “The fact that you have a social media that tells you how many characters to use, this is language imposition. You have to wonder about the agenda there. Why does anyone want to restrict the full range of my language? What’s the game there?
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in McLuhanian fashion, the constraints and the architecture change not only what messages we receive but how we choose to respond. Often that choice is to behave like the platform itself: We are quicker to respond and more aggressive than we might be elsewhere, with a mindset toward engagement and visibility
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it’s easy to argue that we stand to gain something essential and human if we lose Twitter. But there is plenty about Twitter that is also essential and human.
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No other tool has connected me to the world—to random bits of news, knowledge, absurdist humor, activism, and expertise, and to scores of real personal interactions—like Twitter has
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What makes evaluating a life beyond Twitter so hard is that everything that makes the service truly special is also what makes it interminable and toxic.
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the worst experience you can have on the platform is to “win” and go viral. Generally, it seems that the more successful a person is at using Twitter, the more they refer to it as a hellsite.