Over at the New Atlantis, Alan Jacobs has a post arguing that Twitter has changed in a fundamental–and fundamentally unpleasant–way. A sample:
Recently Marco Arment got into a something of a pissing match on Twitter, and says that he learned a few things from it. For instance, he’s going to stop hate-retweeting some of the nastiest comments he gets, which I have always thought was a bad idea anyway. He’s going to take more time away from social media. And he’s going to reconsider the access to his life that he grants, that all of us grant, to strangers on social media. “We allow people access to us 24/7. We’re always in public, constantly checking an anonymous comment box, trying to explain ourselves to everyone, and trying to win unwinnable arguments with strangers who don’t matter in our lives at all.”
Jacobs isn’t the only one_he mentions a couple of other smart writers (Marco Armentand Frank Chimero) who are rethinking Twitter, too. Patton Oswalt took a Twitter hiatus this summer. Even the Atlantic Monthly thinks Twitter is in its twilight (in terms of its value to users, not usage).
Never having been particularly fond of Twitter myself, I don’t have a lot to add here. Except for encouragement. Leaving Twitter is a good thing. Think of it this way: There’s a finite number of words you’re able to read in a lifetime. Do you really want to spend hundreds of thousands of those on Twitter feeds? Me neither.
You’d be much better off spending time with writers who pre-date the Internet age. In recent months I’ve been reading a lot from two writers_Theodore Dalrymple and Christopher Lasch_who, according the Internet, barely exist. Really: Between the two of them you get fewer than 500,000 results when you do a Google search. Search for Ezra Klein_a 30-year-old blogger who goes on MSNBC_and you get almost 1.4 million.
Yet Dalrymple and Lasch have very Big Things to say about life, power, politics, and the human condition. There are more things in heaven and earth than are catalogued on the Internet. Twitter does not help you discover such things. It obscures them.
If the era of Big Twitter really is coming to a close, it is much to the good.
