A few years ago, I found a research article by Professor Brian Ott, The Age of Twitter: Donald J. Trump and the Politics of Debasement. He argued that Twitter, as a communication platform, has fundamentally altered public discourse by favouring simplicity, impulsivity, and incivility.
I considered it an excellent analysis of the topography of twitter interactions, and it also helped me understand my own behaviors.
I have shared that article with many people close to me, and it is one of my motivations for starting this blog.
I opened my first twitter account in 2013 and it quickly became a source of information, and a place to share my opinions, thoughts, learnings and experiences to mostly total strangers.
I’d often find myself tweeting on impulse, applying my own views to other people’s thoughts and then quote-tweeting them to let them know how wrong they were. I’d immediately tweet anything that came to my mind, without pausing to reflect.
I shared personal stories some of which were necessary and most of which were not. The immediacy of sharing everything was intoxicating and exciting.
In 2021, I was sued for libel by the wife of a politician because of comments an anti-SGBV pressure group I belonged to had made online. In the opening of the legal letter, the lawyer referred to me as one of the most vocal members of the group. So, the tweet was not made directly by me, but when they were hunting members of my group, I was easy to find.
In retrospect, both sides could have handled the situation better, but that entire episode was symptomatic of Twitter interactions, nobody really thinks things through at first. That experience was the earliest time I began seriously evaluating my interactions on the platform.
From then on, whenever I tweeted and received significant interaction, I’d panic. Even when the feedback was largely positive, I’d compulsively scroll through every quote tweet, like, and retweet. It became an exhausting ritual, one I couldn’t bring myself to stop. I’d promise myself I would log out for the day, only to find myself logging back in within hours.
This cycle continued until I discovered that I could deactivate my account and reactivate it within a 3 month window. This feature really saved me because I realized that one of my deepest fears about logging off was that I might get into trouble, be tagged in some controversy, and not be online to defend myself.
I carried such an overwhelming need for validation and it is genuinely one of the most anxiety inducing things. Since deactivation made my profile invisible, it finally allowed me to relax.
The first time I deactivated my account, I felt a clarity of thinking that I had not experienced in a long time. There weren’t thousands of tweets each with different emotional signals being processed by my brain every second.
Eventually, I deactivated one final time and simply forgot to log back in. After three months of inactivity, Twitter automatically deleted my account.
I recently stumbled on a discussion where one of the participants mentioned all the things they keep in their drafts and hesitated to tweet because of how quickly discussions become chaotic on the platform. That conversation sparked the idea for thingsialmsottweeted.com
I have always wanted to own a blog where I could learn to write the kind of thoughtful pieces I love to read. Things I Almost Tweeted is that experiement, it will be a bureau of my extended thoughts and critique on culture, technology, literature, and my other obsessions.
Hopefully I can contribute something more meaningful to the discourse than the reactive commentary that defined my Twitter years.
Welcome.
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