Anonymous asked: Why did you leave Twitter? Are you coming back?
Thanks for asking! I signed off for two main reasons: I needed to make sure that I could, and I want to know more about what the opportunity cost of all that twitter time and attention might be. It’s not y’all; it’s me.
The seductive promise of twitter is that it’s just skimming off attention that wouldn’t have been applied to any constructive purpose anyway. You’re just refreshing your feed while a large file downloads, or you are waiting in line at the drugstore, or whatever. I could tell myself for a while that twitter offered pure upside — it reprocessed otherwise wasted moments into ambient sociability and novelty at random intervals.
I am, of course, a credulous dupe. In fact, the noncontiguous distribution of all those moments means that trying to follow my twitter feed incurs switching costs that really add up, like a fragmented hard drive.
That same fragmented aspect of the experience means that when I signed off, I didn’t get back a useful block of time the way I would if I, say, stopped sleeping. Instead, I feel like I recover capacity at a rate of about 15%. In other words, every hour of twitter foregone yields about nine minutes of time that can be usefully applied to other stuff. Even under the most aggressive accounting of how many minutes I used to spend tweeting or following links, that doesn’t work out to much useful time at the margin. I don’t suddenly find myself with the time to write more, or learn node.js and mongodb. There is, however, a lot less friction between the thinking of what I ought to be doing and the doing of it, which I have never lacked for. I burn fewer things on the stove, and move more quickly from the computer to the morning run. I am, of course, more “in the moment,” which is not always the glorious state of being that it’s cracked up to be.
This fast has limned some other aspects of how mind-bending a drug twitter really is to my brain. Without the opportunity to announce each nanoepiphany as it happens, I soon realized how thoroughly I had come to mediate my own perception as potential performance. That was weird and unsettling, and probably a sign that I am dangerously ill-suited to certain technologies.
Also, I’m surprised by how oddly incommensurable the demands and promises of life online seem. As I said to a friend via email,
…one thing this abstention has made clear is just how asymmetrical the inbound and outbound aspects of twitter (and maybe online broadcasting in general) are. My compulsive behavior as a reader of tweets has much less to do with my compulsive behavior as a writer of tweets than I ever thought - it’s like admitting you’re an alcoholic but discovering, once in rehab, that you are, through two separate mechanisms, hooked on both alcohol and the sound of ice cubes in a glass.
It’s just the innate human craving for pattern and order that makes me feel this way — there’s no reason the internet should offer equal portions of, say, attention, economic opportunity, novelty, sociability, and entertainment any more than the cosmos should contain balanced proportions of fire, wood, earth, metal, and wind — but it nags at the soul. I want a feng shui of my online world a lot more than I want my house lined up with the hillside and bamboo grove or whatever.
I really don’t want to be a dry drunk about this. I plan to get back to twitter one of these days, but I’d prefer for this time away to be more than an exercise in petty navel-gazing. So I have set myself a few small goals, little projects that I hope to share and, with a clean conscience, return to twitter. Because, after all, some sandwiches are too good to just eat.
