What I’ve Learned Via My Foray Into the Twitterverse

Or is it the “X-verse”?

One of the things I have repeatedly said (which some of you may remember) is that Twitter is in many if not most ways, an enemy of thoughtful discourse. This can easily be said about just about every variety of social media, but some are worse that others.

There’s Instagram, which I have been on for several years, though I rarely post anything. Its primary function in my life is keep up with family members around the country, church family photos, and to read the latest from the few Christian ministries I think produce sound doctrinal content. Before I continue, yes. I know that Instagram is owned by Facebook.

However, there’s Facebook proper, in it’s original format. I’ve never held an account and I eschewed it early on after learning of family feuds breaking out because one family member didn’t like something another one said about this or that topic. Also, I have the phone numbers of the few people from my high school that I have any interest in keeping up with. I’m generally not the Memory Lane type, so wondering “Whatever happened to so and so?” has never motivated me to take to Facebook.

And then, there’s Twitter. I avoided Twitter for a very long time. I only made an account because the format changed so that you couldn’t even read interesting threads unless you had an account. I still think it does more harm than good, due to its oversized reach when compared to the numbers of Americans who actually use the platform.

However, I also figured something out that’s pretty startling. One more than one occasion, I have known of people who wanted to make a formal complaint or request to their local governing officials. After doing things the old fashioned way (calling, emailing, etc), they only got responses when they took their complaint to social media (either Twitter or Facebook). Not only did they get swift replies, but they got replies from people who actually had the power to get something done, and got it done due to their keen awareness of the proximity of the voter who reached out. That, my friends, is very good to know!

Lastly, the simple fact of the matter is that news breaks on Twitter first. I’m not referring only to national and international news, but again; local stuff. One more than one occasion my husband has run into weird traffic at a weird time of day and called to ask if there was an accident since he couldn’t find the info on the radio. Twitter gave me the 411 (accidents, construction, etc) in less than a minute.

The above examples are the back story of how I went from “Twitter is evil!” to seeing some usefulness in it. I follow my county mayor even though I didn’t vote for him. I follow my district’s school board representative, even though we don’t use government schools. I follow our governor, and a few other government representatives and news outlets. However, and here’s where the learning part comes in: like Alice down the rabbit whole, I started following a bunch of other folks and found myself realizing once again, how unfruitful the Internet can be when it comes to the public discourse.

Among the non-essential accounts I follow are my favorite Reformed Christian content outlets such as Canon Press and Founders Ministries, as well as specific Bible teachers. There are few news outlets that I like, and a few independent content creators as well. The latter is mostly men and women of a traditionalist. anti-feminist mindset. Lastly, there are the political types, and I need not say more about that. So, what have I learned? Here goes:

• Twitter denizens who spend exorbitant amounts of time there don’t seem to realize that things that blow up Twitter are often never even heard of among the 75% of Americans who are not active on Twitter. Being a part of two sizeable, highly conservative, traditional communities has proven this to be true.
• The Twitterverse has elevated the picking of nits to an art form. One of the most glaring examples of this is the near constant bickering in Reformed Christian Twitter on the subject of so-called Christian Nationalism. I have a position (pro), but at this point I’m convinced that it doesn’t matter because by the time enough Christians are ever convinced that laws based on Christian morality are not oppressive, America will have fallen.
• Race consciousness is dialed up to 11. It’s one of the things that makes me grateful that Twitter is used by only roughly 23% of Americans and that broadcast news has largely fallen out of favor with most people on the left and the right. While it is impossible to miss attempts to use ethnic differences to draw our attention away from the fact that we are being pillaged and plundered by our leaders, it’s not as bad as it would be if more people were on Twitter.
• Twitter’s battle of the sexes makes the early “red pill” blogosphere look like kindergarten stuff. Both the feminists and the masculinists (is that redundant?) use the most inflammatory rhetoric they can to boost engagement with their content. The toxicity is enough to make you wonder how we are still propagating the species, until you remember that:
• Twitter is NOT AT ALL representative of what people are thinking and talking about in the real world. Yes, in certain circles (ours for example) many of the hot topics are discussed and touched upon, but not nearly with the same level of nitpicking, taking sides without nuance, or allowances for human realities.
• There is some utility to social media sites such as Twitter if you can approach them with a measured assessment of things, and temper your time there. One of the things I have found myself noting over the past 11 months is that drastically reducing my time online has been -easily- one of the best decisions I have made. It makes it much easier to look at the topics du jour from a detached perspective which allows for noting the beam in my own eye before obsessing over the speck in my brother’s.

Whelp. That’s what I’ve learned from Twitter over the past year. If there are more things to notice, feel free to add to the list in the comments.