Read on Twitter
A new standard I'm spitballing as one means of engaging with Twitter more healthily: am I happy to make the statement/joke/thread even if I am met with silence?
I say this because we've all been in a group setting where we've made a comment or cracked a joke which gets lost in the thick soup of voices and thus unacknowledged. Our ego may get a slight knock, but we get over it.
I think it's imp. to cultivate a similar resilience with Twitter. How about setting our expectations for engagement low? Even better, work with the assumption that no one will respond at all. Does what you want to say still feel worthwhile in this new remit? Is so, type away!
Or you can just delete a tweet when it flops, as we've all done. But I dunno... I think it keeps us humble to remember that not all of our thoughts, quips or ideas are golden! Ofc the levels of curation and self consciousness online are impossible to transcend BUT
I think the cost of constantly creating a 'greatest hits' out of what we say online is this filters through into our IRL conversations and into the very process of thinking itself. We've created a 'Twitterfication' of cognition, so to speak.
This is a new criteria I'm testing out and thought I'd share incase the anxiety of whether your tweet is gonna pop plagues any of you. Let's aim for crickets and tumbleweed. Let's lean in to 4/10 comedic premises and clunkily expressed hot takes. Its okay!
Not to mention that being inundated with likes, comments and feedback, esp when it is loud, polarised and incessant, is as discomfiting as silence, if not more so. Like a 1000 strangers squeezed into the living room of your brain talking at you in their outside voices. Grim.
I hope that with this new attitude, any engagement is, in theory, a surprise and a delight, not an expectation. Maybe I severely underestimate my/our rapacious desire for attention and approval but I'm gonna give it a go starting now SEND TWEET.
