I’ve been watching the current Twitter fiasco from a distance. I never really liked the platform, because the character limit forces you to sloganize everything you say and reading threads just makes you feel either sad, angry, or condescended upon depending on the content. But I’m just not quite sure what to say seeing one of the most loathsome people in the world taking hold of it and treating it like a dumb playpen for his clueless man-child whims. It’s wild, to say the least.
A lot of people have been migrating to other sites, including Tumblr. I’ve seen mixed reactions about that, but honestly, I could care less what people use to whine about things on the internet. Besides, I’ve been sort of crossing my fingers for some sort of resurgence for blogging. Even though most of what I see on Tumblr is less actual blogging and more reposting pretty pictures and political opinions that have about a fifty-fifty chance of being the worst takes ever. Yeah, I do these things to a small extent, but hey, I like hearing what people have to say! It should be encouraged more.
Much of the overall sentiment I see in regards to the Twitter refugee thing is one that stands firmly against what the internet has become, i.e. social media. If you ask me, it pretty much all comes down to the incredibly potent force that is nostalgia. When it’s brewing and piping hot, there’s no room for constructive criticism of change. There’s just rejection and angst. I use Facebook enough to say that with abject certainty. I know plenty of people who critique social media and the internet in general on the regular while being aware that they rely on it for some of their most cherished connections. Twitter was the site of the Arab Spring, and it’s also a place for humans to just be human, and humans can be pretty stupid. It’s not all black and white, and there’s plenty of shades of gray to come by. It feels ironic to blindly screed against social media fakeness when you’re using your distaste solely to gain a pedestal and be a self-important, isolated martyr for a day. I hate this attitude, and it applies to the real world even more than it does to zeros and ones on a screen. Not every act has to be crafted into some perfect, radical expression of the personal-as-political for showy soapbox adventures. Sometimes, the least in-your-face acts can make the biggest waves. And sometimes, an act can just be an act, no matter what platform it happens on. It’s what you make of it.
The internet is stupid. Humans are stupid. We shouldn’t let belligerent overgrown babies lord over us while we nibble for useless trinkets. GO OUTSIIIIIIIIIDE.
