For a while, I was growing more active on twitter. I made occasional posts, I would like things, I would retweet things, I would read things. I was a latecomer to academic twitter and was initially delighted by the threads providing summaries and discussions of various social scientific and statistical topics.
But this summer I simply couldn’t do it anymore. Somehow, despite the very real fact that twitter is populated by very thoughtful and intelligent social scientists and statisticians frequently engaging in productive conversation (this is very real and what drew me to the site in the first place), the way I have ended up using the site has had a negative impact on my personal wellbeing and professional development. Below are the main reasons I decided to stop participating on the website, with the exception of responding to someone directly addressing me. Keep in mind, my thinking on these topics are likely derivative of folks like Cal Newport, Jaron Lanier, and Nicholas Carr.
Casino mentality: I found myself increasingly treating twitter like a slot machine. I could feel my body getting small pleasurable hits of emotion, excitement, and frustration while checking, reading, and receiving feedback on the site. It became difficult for me to determine when I was engaging other scholars and their ideas in good faith, and when I was using their posts for personal emotional payoffs.
Perfect feedback loops: twitter provided the perfect blend of positive and negative emotional and intellectual reinforcement. I’d sift through silly points and find myself growing frustrated with them until I saw a juicy, thoughtful thread or helpful link. Then I’d start growing bored with these types of posts, only to have them broken with a perfect, snarky pun. I’d see ideas provided by folks that I was really excited by, and then get riled up by a frustrating or thoughtful or cruel argument I disagreed with (almost always complemented with a snarky takedown or upward status-oriented praise by someone else). I am fairly certain that I was getting caught in a system of alternating, seemingly random patterns of positive and negative reinforcement. A very dangerous and addictive cycle to be a part of.
Emotional and intellectual engagement: Building off of the first two points, I grew worried with how I was emotionally engaging with the more academic threads. I found myself getting riled up into a sports mentality, booing an opposition / cheering my side. Of course, one cannot completely sever one’s emotional and intellectual experiences. So it’s not that twitter introduced emotion into my academic pursuits. It was the manner in which my emotional self related to academic threads. I lost some of the excitement of discovery, admiration of other’s work, and confusion and frustration with the engagement of the more fine grained details of a particular work. Further, as discussed above, I felt that I increasingly pursued twitter activity to fulfill emotional payoffs, rather than having healthy emotional responses incorporated into my intellectual work.
Conversation: Andrew Gelman has an extraordinary blog. The best part is the comment section, where there are regulars engaging in conversations spanning decades. twitter is simply terrible at providing a logical system of engagement and response. twitter threads are too jumbled with people responding to certain tweets. It’s a maze and a mess. Many times, comments are simple snark bits that make little forward contribution.
Counterfactual: As I grew increasingly wary of my engagement style with twitter and my increasing use of it for personal emotional gratification, I started thinking about how utterly bizarre it is that this website has become so deeply incorporated with academic professionalization. twitter isn’t the only social media website to come along. I started making jokes with people about an alternative reality where chat roulette was the social media site that became entangled with the discipline. What would our professionalization seminars be in that world? “Always be ready to engage with the next person, even if your last experience was frustrating. You never know when it’s going to be a leading scholar in the field!” Absurd, but maybe the world we live in has its baked in absurdities too.
Thinking: I found myself thinking of short quips I could post while going about my life, or else processing the world around me through how it could be written as an efficient, compelling post. This was disturbing to me. It reminded me of a spring break during high school when I did nothing but play World of Warcraft, and I began dreaming in its format.
Squeezes and juices: After stepping away from the website, I realize that the benefits I was deriving from twitter engagement were far outpaced by the costs it took to be a twitter user, both in terms of my emotional wellbeing and time use. The occasional link to a blog or paper wasn’t shifting my research or thinking in a profound way. twitter explainers are helpful sometimes, but I have come to believe that they bias my interpretation of the field towards those who are more likely to, well, make twitter explainers. I’ve also come to believe that it’s my occupational duty to not devote too much attention to these threads to ensure they aren’t overly influential in moving the field.
This is all a bummer, because there are obviously extraordinarily bright, thoughtful, engaging people using twitter productively. I will occasionally log onto twitter and directly search for folks who tend to produce useful, occupationally niche conversations.
Note: my points above in no way are meant to suggest others use twitter as poorly as I do. Certainly many don’t. I’m deeply grateful that I was able to proceed along my career without needing to engage on this platform. That’s a privilege that fewer folks likely feel these days. This is just my set of reasons why I decided to opt out. I don’t use it well.