Return to (long)Form

Well, it seems like Twitter might be going away. I’m not totally convinced it will, but it does seem like a moment to reflect on the site and my own involvement with it. Maybe in two weeks it’ll be down and down for good, but even if not, I’m not sure I want to continue spending much time there.

Like the 2012 film from Douglas Blush and Lisa J. Klein, I’m of two minds about the whole thing. Twitter is place where I regularly discover super neat stuff and super interesting ideas. Threads on writing or figures lost to history, news from other parts of the world I hadn’t seen, publishing advice and warnings, explanations of Gamestonk (which I still don’t get) and NFTs (which I don’t think I ever want to get)—it was all part of the regular offering of Twitter. At its best, it felt like a big, diverse, messy, interesting conversation that never stopped, and I liked peeking at it most days, even if I didn’t post that much. And when I did tweet, it was never with the pressure that I feel when writing one of these blog posts. Dumb jokes and funny pictures and dunk tweets and all the rest were welcome there.

I got to meet and watch other writers as they navigated publishing books, stories, doing interviews and podcasts—I was able to see how others did it and learn what I could from that. I could cheer on friends on their book birthdays and when their stories came out, and I could commiserate with them when things didn’t go their way. Twitter often felt huge to me, but sometimes it felt small and personal, like being in the same room with a pal.

Maybe more accurately (for me): it felt like a classroom. My favorite part of being a student was when, after having all gone away on our own and read some interesting book or article or whatever, the class would come together in the class to discuss and react to and dunk on and be inspired by whatever we’d read. Even when I wouldn’t participate in class discussions when I was a student, I always got something out of the conversation and would leave the classroom feeling excited or interested, feeling like I’d engaged with and been engaged by some bigger goings-on of the world and my peers. When the bird app was really working for me, I had that same feeling with it.

And yet Twitter was a thing I never really looked forward to opening, and it was a thing I almost never felt great after spending time on. The small interactions and cool bits were almost always overshadowed by the dread of the scroll, the batshit insane screeds that seemed to be perpetually amplified by The Holy Algorithms, and the sense that I had just given away time to something that, mostly, didn’t give much back. I watched people be colossally mean to one another almost daily. I saw battalion after battalion of bad faith questions heading off to internet war.

Ezra Klein recently had George Saunders on his podcast to talk about fiction, politics, and communication. I was out for a run while listening to it, trudging along gravel roads in the middle of nowhere under heavy, soon-to-be-winter skies, and I was so struck by this bit from Saunders that I forgot where I was going for a little bit and completely missed my turn for home:

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Right. So my thing is just look at your mind when you’re doing the one and when you’re looking at the other. Look at your mind when you begin a Chekhov story and when you finish it. What kind of things have been evoked?

Go on Twitter for 40 minutes, the same time it takes read a Chekhov. Where’s your mind there? The medium is a message because if I have said to you, here’s the way in which you can communicate, that’s going to limit what you can say. It’s going to limit the state of your mind while you’re saying it. If you think about the sheer volume of our social media interactions, it’s got to change the national moment. We can see that it as kind of fun, affable toxin, really.

For me, even when the content of Twitter was really good (participatory and interesting, full of kind things being discussed by kind people), the form of it was always, or almost always, a bad thing. Reflecting on it now, I think it did change my brain, affecting how I participated in conversations, what kinds of conversations I looked for, where and how much time I put into slow, careful thought about stuff, etc. I don’t think that has to be the case, and I’m sure there are people who can interact with Twitter/social media without those kinds of deteriorating effects, but I’m not so sure I’m one of them!

I’ve been reading Jon Fosse’s Septology recently, and I’ve been thinking about his ideas about slow prose. I know, I know—literary writers can stare so hard at their own navels that they start to see the grass behind them, but I do find myself longing for fiction (and ideas) that takes its time, and I find myself wanting that from the media I consume, too—social or not.

To go back to the classroom comparison: I think my favorite times in class were those when we, as a group, wrestled with big, complicated ideas that were never and would never be solved, but each of us was made better by the struggling. And increasingly on Twitter, I find myself needing to give (and looking to read) the short, snappy answer to the big, messy question. I know threads exist, and I’m not saying everyone on Twitter is like this or that every discussion is like this, but many are, and the site itself, the form and structure of it, seems built to amplify these short, snappy bits of snark or riposte.

So maybe I’ll just retire to this spot. Twitter offered engagement (or at least the illusion of engagement) from other people, and I have no doubt that will almost entirely disappear if I just write here. I suspect the days of really active blogs/journals (both in terms of posting and responding) are gone, but that’s ok. This space is a nice one for me to work out my own thoughts, and to perhaps engage with other people who want to do the same.

And who knows? Maybe Twitter will endure, maybe in a new form or maybe in this one, though I suspect it will emerge changed somehow. If it does, I might still hang around there some.

It’s funny—I remember when Twitter came into existence. I was sitting in my friend Katrina’s apartment at college, several of us around, wedged into couches or socked into bean bag chairs, and there was Twitter. It was sort of like Facebook, but totally different. You could post stuff for anyone to see! You could see what other people were posting! Celebrities and friends alike were just right there, putting their short-form thoughts out into a big text conversation that slowly scrolled along. It seemed at once miraculous and dumb, big and shallow. Maybe it always was both. Maybe it was never either.

Anyway, if you want to find me, you can always email me. Or look for me in my books. I have more stories I’d like to tell, and I’d love for you to read them. And, I’ll be here, writing occasionally. I hope you’ll write back.

Maybe I’ll even be over there, too.