Notes on Lifestream : TVVITTER lurker
There's no formal equivalent to twitter (can you believe it's already 15 years old?), if you wanna think referentially the most you can do is relate your approach to it to the way you understand another form of social contact and/or communication.
My approach to twitter is that it's a very complex collective collage of journalism, journaling, a play of the linguistic, neither fiction nor non-fiction, only feeds.
It's a maze, a cut-up of fast-paced media content, filler, jokes, links, traps, doors, invitations, moodkillers, pranks, transphobia, bullshit, sexual fixations, spam, ads.
In a sense MTV(which is tiktok) was the precursor to that affective experience : the excess of it all being the one similarity between the two experiences : no matter how dedicated you are, you know you can never "complete" either twitter or mtv. They're feeds, not projects or artworks.
Twitter goes too fast to have its common experience be encapsulated and nobody would be crazy enough to try to go through all of it : it's a continuous stream of things that aim to capture your attention and keep you there, i'm not telling you anything new here : twitter bad.
But "twitter bad" in a way that is reminiscient of previous media forms, I'm going to try not to quote Mcluhan too much during this serie but :
“When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past.”
Twitter is a treasure-trove of all the things I've been talking about and it is continuously doing that thing platform monopolies do with their network effects and their high costs of exit : People attract more people who attract more connections who attract more interactions. It goes on and on, a stream of exchanges that never goes off the air.
There lies the network effects : As long as the barriers to entry into the website are low, the people stay there and keep coming, when/if the site'll start to up the costs of engagement, we'll see the end of this pool of open information, for now all the difficulty is on leaving behind your connections, friends, "likes", a heavy coat of followers and mutuals that weighs like the sunk cost of having dedicated time to this online socializing.
Maybe the problem of twitter is that a lot of people are misusing it, which is a claim that's gonna sound a bit insufferable in a few lines when i'll explain my position further, for a start : I don't have a twitter account.
I'm a permanent lurker without any capacity to slide into anyone's DMs or follow an account on the app, which might explain why I can appreciate the website/milieux to a greater extent than those who criticise it from a user's POV and without suffering the same amount of psychic damage.
I can't be stalked by twitter users for something I tweeted, I can't share something that will blow up my mentions, I can't be subtweeted in any ways that matters or perma/shadowbanned or blocked or kicked out of the platform. I have the rights of someone who's never been in the register. My use of the website is invisible to the other users of the platform, like a rat in the walls of the common room.
All of the possible conflicts are closed off to me and allows me to privilege a different engagement with both the site and the people on it. Some would say I'm merely reacting to others' reactions when i say they're "misusing" the platform. They're right but have only a part of it, I'd say I'm only engaging with parts of twitter. The parts that are most innocuous, non-threatening, the parts that get people to branch off of twitter in fact: twitter is most useful to me either to notice forms of flash fiction or in noticing connections/links and leaving the site for such and such other website.
I have people in my search-history whose account I frequently go to, to see what they're talking about, who they're linking to, if they've been banned. I'm never exposed to "opt out" options on twitter because i still operate according to the "opt in" logic of old internet media : I voluntarily subject myself to the feed of someone rather than coming good on the promise of checking up with what they've been tweeting, retweeting and liking, the promise of being someone's follower is one I don't have to think about except when it's mentioned in some tweet, I'm less suprised by someone's endorsement of such and such because I very actively seek out evidence of that someone's opinions and views. There's some form of privilege(in the sense that there's hoops i don't need to go through) to this : I don't have a career attached to social-media, in fact I don't think it would do me any good to have a career whatsoever.
I'm very much an autodidact brainworm farmer.
Ospare's guidelines for lurking :
Links over threads.
Always open people's blogs, personal websites and repositories, never look through their feed before having had a look at what they deem important enough to put it in their bios, pinned threads or location info.The Searchbar is treacherous
The twitter searchbar will not look for approximate search-terms or synonyms and will sometimes hide results if they're too old so you need to get ahold of the advanced search features(much like google and youtube tbh) in order to get the goods consistently.Look for connections.
Not in the sense of making friends (though that's always welcome) but in the sense of looking at the people that are frequently retweeted by people you're already interested in.Stop for the cringe
take the time to take-in and truly feel the gag-reflex that comes with witnessing an absolutely embarassing situation someone is subjecting themselves to and remind yourself why you don't have an account on the website.(Twitter is TV, don't be an actor).Don't worry, thinking comes later
the fact is that in digging through accounts following accounts following accounts you will end up with some 14 open windows, much in the same way wikipedia can take you through a wormhole of information. Don't feel too bad about it, put the most interesting accounts in a bookmark for later and keep going down the trail you're onto.Archive the good stuff.
Threads don't live forever, neither do their accounts. The wayback machine always needs more fingers ready to archive stuff so get to it. Or even better, make a bot.Don't jump the gun
Be careful to find the actual source of scary news and bits of information. Don't believe the hype, it's very easy to launch a false alarm if you're at the right lever with the right amount of information, under the right shape.Excess.
Always read with the assumption that there's more but don't expect the more in question to be of use.