This was a bit of a “loaded statement” when people would ask if I had a Twitter account and I happily declined by stating a very strong and uninformed opinion about what I had assumed it to be... a misguided mindset that I had previously relied on… especially when I had once “neatly tucked” the tagline “Twitter is for Twats” in a short bio about myself through my other social media platforms as a snarky attempt to “separate” myself from the masses. Not sure why I found it so necessary to “assert” my identity with passive-aggressive reservations on the notorious think-tank or why I assumed that those who partake in Twitter were idiots, but I just wanted nothing to do with it.
Before I finally gave in to the masses, I had taken a gap year in the middle of my college career and naively created a Twitter account on November 2014 as a desperate attempt to “stay on top” of concert dates or album/merch drops from my favorite artists. (Side note: Still bummed that I missed out on Childish Gambino’s concert during the BTI era when he was in SD for the Deep Web Tour… I really should have been on Twitter around that time.) While I was in LA trying to “find myself” and figure out what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, I went to music festivals, “Hollywood” movie premieres, and really boring celebutante events, etc. but needless to say, “carpe diem” was all I cared about at the time. Distancing myself from what my peers and what the masses had to offer on Twitter, I was instead superficially focused on “being there” for musicians and live sets.
I won’t go into why I went off the grid afterwards, but I started caring more about Twitter when “the politics of identity” paved a way to the forefront and I had just gotten my heart broken for the very first time. Halfway into my gap year and the “new year, new me” B.S., I was more lost than ever… seeking a way to reinvent myself without having to cater to what an individual thought of me.
Not only did Twitter become a place to stay updated on current events, but it also allowed me to better understand the practice of self-care, the body-posi movement, the amount of mental health awareness on an emotional spectrum, the beauty of aspiring MUA’s and the beauty community sharing their passion for a bold lip or winged eyeliner, appreciation for different cultures by listening to other marginalized voices and calling out others who participated in problematic dialogue; all the while getting rid of the male gaze by critiquing a barrage of sex-saturated images and focusing on the female-oriented dialogue of self-love. Twitter became a source of immediacy where I could engage in conversations about identity and maintain my own curated space of intellectual freedom… to pursue certain topics of interest without any restraint, to have access to “real-time” information that had not hit mainstream media yet until hours, weeks, or months later, and to ultimately find like-minded individuals that were also as accepting as I was to embrace such an uplifting community.
What surprised me the most about Twitter was probably the citizen journalism aspect of a 140-character platform… covering “breaking news” where people from all around the world reported on any crisis that had not been covered or touched on in mainstream media. In Jewitt’s commentary, it was an estimated 30 minute head start that someone had tweeted about the tremors before any other media outlet had reported on the earthquake in China. Or in many cases, it could have been 30 minutes too late if there needed to be an emergency evacuation and some people didn’t have access to the “live-reporting” of accessing their government’s Twitter account. (Also, how powerful of a chain reaction is it that a UC Berkeley student was able to “rally” his followers when he tweeted out a single word: “arrested” and was able to get a lawyer to bail him out shortly after? That’s got to be some kind of “swift” poetic justice, if anything, considering how slow the justice system normally operates.)
For me, I had found out about “a possible bomb threat” at my sister’s community college during exams week within the hour as it unfolded earlier this summer. Or more recently, when there was a school shooting at UCLA and I had been scrolling thru the hashtags re: a Bruin mentioning that a bunch of her students were running away from the Engineering building. My heart fell as I listened to a live police scanner that was streamed online via Twitter in anticipation for good news, not the usual bad news… or when there was a canyon fire in the apartment complex I just moved into in August a couple doors down… and the physical immediacy of actually being there when I saw four fire trucks blaring through the intersection past my apartment… it was all so surreal… that I had to email my professor to ask for some advice as to how one would be able to navigate the “real world” and maintain their sanity in the midst of all this chaos.
Sometimes I admit that Twitter’s “immediacy” and real-time info. is not too great for someone who suffers from poor mental health. It is absolutely necessary that I take a break from being a total information sponge and that I go on a social media cleanse where I’m offline for a week… a month… four years even (Hey, FB). Hyperconsumption, in this case, is not healthy when you get too caught up on things that matter to you (a lot of distractors that “shouldn’t” even matter to you at all) or that pertain to some aspect of your identity… and yet, there’s a frighteningly magnetic pull with a bit of learned helplessness when too much exposure of what really happens in the “real world” can inevitably lead to you questioning your existence.
But I digress: Twitter is a great platform for marginalized voices; indicative of underrepresented subcultures that hardly ever get a chance to speak up for themselves in mainstream media. Twitter can be an awe-inspiring community when you exercise the “Mute” button on your problematic faves and no longer have to sit thru offensive content, or “Block” the racist bigots off your TL. You can see how trends are circulated through memes or text posts, the controversial “racial divide” when those with a chip on their shoulder or a massive superiority complex try to put down another marginalized group without inadvertently calling upon a coalition of the same marginalized members of that said group to come to their immediate defense, the call-out culture of twats who don’t think before they tweet and the heroes who save screenshots or “receipts” of the said twat’s deleted tweet(s), and so many different exchanges from countless people that probably could not realistically occur within a day’s time…
Yes, a bit exhausting, isn’t it? Or exhilarating, depending on how you see it. I suppose that the same kind of disdain I initially felt about Twitter gradually became how I felt about having a Facebook… where I didn’t want to pay a penny for my peers’ thoughts or be forced to “needlessly” and “continuously” interact with people who didn’t necessarily share the same interests and values as I did… but feeling bad for even thinking about “defriending” people (sometimes IRL) took too much of my time and resources. My emotional reserves were at zero capacity and I felt entrapped by the weight of having to “look” at my friends’ feed or pretend to “like” all the distracting news feed… I didn’t want to look at advertisements anymore or people I knew from grade school getting married and having kids… and I sure as hell did not care for the bombardment of seeing people’s ignorant comments everywhere in my immediate social circle either…
In a way, I guess you can call Twitter my “safe space” or something. While FB continues to reinforce people’s beliefs by using the “Likes” and “Shares” that they track through metadata to create an inflated sense of homophily, I no longer have to worry about my news feed remaining the same. I get to follow or unfollow with a click of a button and actively sift thru multiple news sources to ascertain some form of credibility… and I also have the ability to keep challenging my own system of beliefs against a system that is always evolving, to start over and reflect on my current views, while understanding the need for progress as an ever changing thing.
With that being said, Twitter can be very thought-provoking and produce very nuanced discussions about things we may not have ever considered before. Like any responsible social media user, ultimately it’s up to the individual to be aware of what they consume. What are you more interested in? Socializing with the people you know already and will probably have to know more of all your life on a topical level even though you secretly hate them? Or engaging with people you actually want to have a conversation with, instead of having to engage in awkward small talk at an office party? Your call, your penny.
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