My new piece out in The Raven!
It's about how Twitter calls for intimate speech and then crushes that intimacy. About how Twitter rewards us for gambling on shared context - and then gives us the perfect tool to destroy that context.
Thread:
ravenmagazine.org/magazine/twitt…
It's about how Twitter calls for intimate speech and then crushes that intimacy. About how Twitter rewards us for gambling on shared context - and then gives us the perfect tool to destroy that context.
Thread:
ravenmagazine.org/magazine/twitt…
The whole inspiration of the piece is Ted Cohen's philosophy of jokes. Cohen says: all jokes depend on some shared background knowledge. And that shared background needs to emerge as a surprise. You totally ruin the joke if you warn your audience about what they need to know.
So every joke is a trust fall. You take a gamble, a leap of faith. You're depending on the pre-existence of shared context. This is why, says, Cohen, jokes build intimacy. The point of a joke is that you're depending on somebody else to be there for you, to understand.
Twitter often works like jokes. The format of tweets is so short, that we so often depend on shared background context. And the joy of Twitter is when we leap out into the void and we find people that do share that context. Strangers, who get us. It's intimacy out of nothing.
So Twitter encourages intimacy. It calls for high-context speech. It rewards us for it. And then it gives us exactly the tool to rip intimate speech out of its context: the re-tweet.
Maybe my favorite part of this piece was getting to do a philosophical close-reading of one of my favorite tweets ever: @sarahjeong historic, hysterical coup tweet:
https://twitter.com/sarahjeong/status/1346910174120878086?s=20
And check out the inaugural issue of The Raven, a new magazine for public philosophy!
ravenmagazine.org
ravenmagazine.org
PS I love this piece. Am I allowed to say that? It's my favorite thing I've written in years. A vague version of this idea was bouncing around in my head, and when I saw the Cohen connection, I leapt out of my bed and shouted something embarrassingly joyous.
PS there's a factual error in the piece that's already been pointed out - Jeong wasn't fired, but people called for her to be fired, over her tweets. Getting it fixed now - thanks for those that caught it!
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