Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
Dear Matt,
My Twitter account is one long rant. I yell at people—that’s it. I’m not interested in socializing on Twitter or having a fair exchange/convo, because really, how can you do that on Twitter? So the anger has taken over and the question is: How do I think differently about that person who I know is wrong? I know it because I have facts and they don’t. They can’t string a sentence together to save their life, defending their position. There’s just no cohesion there. Why am I supposed to be tolerant of a willfully ignorant, arrogant, neurotic, incessant whining little @#&%?
Suz,
Seattle
Well, I can’t understand why anyone would lock horns with you on Twitter. By my lights, you seem like a gold-plated charmer. You let no slight pass. (Moral consistency.) You’re open to other people’s opinions, so long as they strictly adhere to your own. (Our ideological diversity is our strength.) And you seem to run a tight ship as both a grammarian and a logician (Strunk & White meets Philo the Dialectician).
So I won’t insult you by telling you that you could gin up more empathy for your Twitter combatants by picturing them naked. (Or by having them send pictures of themselves naked, since leaving things to the imagination is not your average twidiot’s strong suit.) Don’t misunderstand me: picturing people naked does have its uses. Pity can sometimes trump hatred. And it’s hard to feel genuine enmity toward anyone else when we visualize each other’s unfortunate contours, secret-shame skin conditions, and random fatty deposits. We all have a load to bear. About 15 pounds more of it on average than we did 20 years ago, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. But you don’t want to gift your enemies material just because you can’t keep your filthy mind off of what Tom Wolfe called their glistening nodules and stiffened giblets.
I have long been on record on the downsides of social media generally, and Twitter, specifically. In a relatively short period of time, The Twidiocracy has changed America, mostly for the worse. We are coarser, louder, more envious, more vain, and all-around more intolerant and intolerable than we were even 10 years ago. But I don’t wish to play that broken record again, as records—much like civility and self-restraint—have largely gone the way of the woolly mammoth. I will not again suggest that our problem is that we’re on social media in the first place, as that is by now a near inevitability. Trying to convince people to forsake it, at this late date, is like standing in the middle of a six-lane highway, trying to convince speeding motorists to return to covered-wagon travel.
Even the few and proud resisters who refuse to join social media (like myself) still spend some time reading it. Not only has it become a necessary exercise when you wish to find out what a friend is up to after they’ve failed to return emails. (Wasting communication on just one other person is such a 20th century anachronism.) But it would be journalistic malpractice not to. As a professional student of human behavior, I’m in the jackass-observation business. When Wild Kingdom’s Jim Fowler wanted to study a defassa waterbuck up close, he didn’t go to downtown Omaha, but to Guinea-Bissau. Similarly, if I wish to study bloviating jackasses in the wild, Twitter is the all-purpose natural habitat, and is both more convenient and more affordable than buying a plane ticket to the Aspen Ideas Festival.
But the real and enduring problem with social media is less with the vehicle than with so many of its drivers. Much as a car can just as easily deliver you to a beautiful destination or to your instant death, depending on how you command it, too many people are letting Twitter kill them—as well our as civic culture—not so softly with its song.
Consider how you are more likely to flip someone off in a car than in a grocery store line (which isn’t the car’s fault, but yours). Similarly, it has become okay to consider Twitter less a tool of communication than a release-valve for petty agitation. In the old days, they used to say opinions were like a-holes—everybody had one. But now, every a-hole has the ability to broadcast its opinion and then to have it retweeted, endlessly.
The upside of the Internet is that everyone now has a voice. The very steep downside is that too often, we now hear too many voices that aren’t worth listening to. And most often they’re the loudest ones.
Many pundits and public philosophers who’ve noticed the increased rancor (which just happens to have coincided with the near universal adoption of social media and smart phones) like to parrot the line that maybe we hate each other more these days because we’ve ceased trying to know each other. There’s an element of truth to this.
But what if they also have it backwards? What if we hate each other more precisely because we do increasingly know each other, more than we’d have any reasonable expectation of doing in another era, when contact was less promiscuous and more meaningful? Sometimes the greatest violence we can do to a person is to demystify them. And what if the part of the other person we know now is the part they wish to project—often, the most aggressive, boorish, quarrelsome part? Hell is knowing what other people think.
Yet being constantly subjected to what other people think has become incredibly hard to escape. Especially when it seems like a full third of Internet journalism is now predicated on surveying and excerpting whatever people are raging about on Twitter. Where someone is always raging about something. On the Internet, rage never takes a sick day.
But as previously stated, maybe the answer to your own Twitter rage problem isn’t to extend love and mercy to your Twitter punching bags. That might be shooting too high. Instead, why not try to let your own worst instincts work for you? Along with rage itself, self-pity is all the rage these days. Everyone who is anyone fancies themselves a victim of somebody’s unfair treatment.
So find the part of them you most loathe that you recognize in yourself, and then spin it into self-pity gold. If you feel sorry for yourself because of what you see in them, maybe you’re on the road to feeling sorry for them, instead of just wishing to rage against them. By doing so, you’re essentially recognizing what the essayist Tim Kreider calls your “Soul Toupee.”
It’s a concept he and a friend invented when regularly downing 32-ounce beers from Styrofoam cups at an oyster bar in Baltimore. After noticing another regular had “the worst toupee in the world, a comical little wig taped in place on the top of his head,” the notion of the Soul Toupee was born:
Most twidiots in their Soul Toupees aren’t fooling anyone. If their Twitter accounts were hairpieces, they’d come with chinstraps and tags flapping out the back. Their volatility and unyielding self-righteousness are transparent covers for their insecurity and overcompensation—for their ceaseless hunger to be heard, even when they have nothing to say.
So maybe ease up on your Twitter fights. After all, considering that as USC researchers recently discovered, up to 48 million Twitter accounts are bots (roughly 15 percent of total users), that deafening ruckus you’re raising might be the sound of one hand fapping: the sound of an unsettled argument that’s broken out between your ugliest self and your better angels.
Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
