In Defense of Twitter

The world may, on occasion, run in 140-character snippets — but it’s not so bad.

Twitter is daunting for the uninitiated because reaping its rewards requires:

Thinking deliberately about the type of information you would like to absorb (work)
Iterative curation (work over time)

It is difficult to explain the platform instructively because the end result for point #1 will look different for everyone (hence point #2).

Poorly-culled, a feed can quickly and easily devolve into a cacophonous echo-chamber — which is bad, assuming you are not aiming to absorb a cacophonous echo chamber, though some people are into that sort of thing. Sometimes the dedvolution is unavoidable (see: primary debates, that thing about dresses that happened a while ago?). Those are the times you can either stay until the black hole collapses into good jokes or shut it all down and participate in what is actually my favorite social network, Talking To My Friends In Person.

That aside, I find Twitter helpful enough as a platform to write out some arguments in favor of its utility:

Things come together. A well-structured feed can mimic, on multi-sourced overdrive, the patterns of creative thought: a host of things you want to think and care about, presented in a format that allows you to connect what may otherwise seem disparate elements. This is hard to deliberately simulate; it’s the kind of non-thinking congealment of things that emerges when standing in line or in the shower or running somewhere uncrowded without music. Twitter’s rapid-fire, chronological structure is the best thing I’ve found to enhance my capacity to make unintuitive connections. Bonus points for deliberately introducing mental breaks that don’t require much processing power (@herdyshepherd1’s pictures of his highland fells, anything @darth).
Deliberate intrusion. I’m 25 and urban-dwelling; I have two nice degrees and views on social issues decently well-aligned with the U.S. Democratic party platform. Most of my friends, or at least the ones I interact with daily, are at least two-ish of those things. I worry a lot about not exposing myself frequently enough to nonconforming perspectives to a) think critically about the ones I hold and b) understand the ones I don’t both comprehensively and empathetically enough to form, respectively, coherent and effective arguments against them. I try to follow smart people I disagree with to break down this barrier, at least a bit. I want their priorities and sources and fears to interrupt my thinking and upend my biases. This is easiest injected organically, regularly, in snippets.
Organic microcommunication. I’m an emotional, fallible, nosy human who cares about people, damnit. I want to know the verbal quirks and weird humor and personal motivations behind the bylines and journal articles and major policy decisions. I very strongly believe that having the sort of background that inevitably leaks through in bite-sized snippets of brain candy makes me a) more adept at processing, contextualizing, and retaining information and b) a better friend/colleague/person in general. Mostly it just cracks me up that Samantha Power thought to inform the world that she went to a Taylor Swift concert and that Cecilia Muñoz only recently learned it’s kind of a goofy old person thing when moms sign their texts “Love, Mom.” That’s actually another part of it: as someone with chronic and incurable case of imposter syndrome, I savor signs that people I might otherwise find intimidating are human. This all obviously works better when you follow people rather than organizations, and when you make sure those people at least sometimes speak for themselves.
Customized aggregation. When you’re so interdisciplinary it’s stupid, Twitter is the only news source that works. I work on global health and technology issues, mainly in the Middle East, which means I want to know about conflict-based interruptions to vaccine supply chains, and technologies that might avert the damage those cause, and which nurses at which clinics in which Palestinian Territory are on strike today, and U.S. electoral shifts that might influence U.S. foreign policy, and maybe I also want to know where there might be free food later, and you get the idea. There is just not a New York Times for that, and I don’t want to have to sift through fifty different tabs to get up-to-date information in all of these disparate silos (including, for what it’s worth, about jobs).
Honing a sense of focus. Twitter’s format has helped me train my brain to differentiate worthwhile information from the morass. You tire of clickbait early and learn not to succumb. You don’t waste as much time thinking about Donald Trump because you stop reading and start scrolling once you’ve avoided clicking on the fifth pseudothinkpiece, and you don’t bore people in person by regurgitating anything about Donald Trump because you got sick of it in a hot second. Win-win.
Crystalization, distillation. I’ve framed most of these as consumer perks, but perhaps the most valuable part of Twitter for me is the producer-end constraint of the platform. Sharing becomes a focused art: why do I care about this, what use is it to others, how do I want to add to the converaation, and how can I most effectively distill that message down to 140 spaces? Moreover, the act of thinking through that process helps congeal the original thing itself in my own mind: I’m more likely to remember an article, a data point, a source or an argument if I’ve already processed, contextualized, and deployed it. In this way, Twitter is a form of public note-taking — one that can, when consciously employed, make everyone smarter.