Three Twitter Accounts Later
I’ve created, curated, and deleted three Twitter accounts since the social media platform’s 2006 inception. But I’m finally off the sauce, safe and sober from the incensed bellowing governed by a biased algorithm and useless character count.
Twitter, a hot mess of hashtags. Twitter, a digital scroll of one-sided discourse. Twitter, a platform paralyzed by a night mode aesthetic and unintelligible rabble.
You can’t retweet your lost time on social media back into existence.
My late grandfather was an avid reader. He liked to consume books and he liked to consume a daily newspaper, though many books and articles, he often remarked, were stupid.
One morning I arrived to visit with my grandfather just as he was finishing reading the newspaper. He told me he read something stupid.
“You know about tweets?” he asked. “Apparently, people read tweets about celebrities. ”
My grandfather would have been in his early seventies and I would have been in my early twenties at the time. I had no idea what he was talking about.
I was late to the smart phone game. T9ing 140 character tweets would have been a harrowing task from a mobile flip phone. My first Twitter account was accessed exclusively from a web browser on my laptop.
I didn’t scroll, tweet, or retweet with any intent. I questioned the point of Twitter? And eventually I abandoned my account.
I found out my spinster aunt had searched, found, and read the Tweets of my abandoned account. My first account was obliterated in short order. I wasn’t aware of privacy settings.
A couple years later I ditched the flip phone for an iPhone 5. Someone had told me to follow their Twitter account. Like a obedient robot I opened a new account and began scrolling, tweeting, and retweeting again.
My second account had some substance and even managed to garner 800 or so followers (though I suspect many were bots). I played hashtags games. I retweeted news articles I thought were important. I attempted to tweet my views and opinions.
My phone crept into my bedroom. Bedtime lost its schedule. Only after my attention to my Twitter feed was lost that I was able to close my eyes. I thought night mode was supposed to be better for you. It just rationalized my late night scrolling.
Hashtag: I Have The Strangest Erection Right Now. Pornography and my Twitter feed came together into a conflux of untethered passion and political confusion. It only took a couple of nights exposed to that mixture before I deleted my second Twitter account.
I’m not sure when or why my third account was opened. But I made a solid effort to scroll, tweet, and retweet with intent. I used the tools offered by the platform to tweak and adjust my experience. I would block and report content I felt negatively impacted my feed. I was thoughtful whenever I opened the Twitter app on my phone.
Then Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. No amount of care and control could suppress the dumpster fire I attempted to scroll, tweet, and retweet my way through. Twitter had devolved into a ghost ship garbage barge.
I held fast. Sometime had passed.
I started seeing tweets of people in China locked down in their homes. Entire Chinese cities looked vacant. New medical sounding hashtags were treading. Twitter was my first exposure to covid-19.
I had to inoculate myself for justifiable fear was murdering my mind and any common sense remaining on my feed was dissolving in a petri dish of hate.
My third Twitter account was deleted shortly before the ICUs in my jurisdiction admitted their first covid-19 infected patient.
Twitter is a fungus, a network of bacteria laden filth. My mental microcosm never did adapt to its putrid hate crosshatched with stupidity. I’m happy to report that I’m safe and sober from Twitter’s ideological intoxicants.
