Thread by @zugzwanged

@itfgothicno6 I principally have in mind the platform itself. And the problem is more one of a failure to design for healthy human interaction. The platform amplifies our weaknesses, vices, and dysfunctions.

There are many ways it does this, but here are a few that immediately come to mind.

@itfgothicno6 Wise speech is speech in season—the right words, to the right persons, by the right person, in the right time and place. However, on Twitter a myriad contexts are collapsed into each other, so you are speaking to everyone, everywhere, all at once. It makes wise speech impossible.

@itfgothicno6 Twitter is simultaneously a realm of social connection and a realm of open discourse. This tends to make tweeting simultaneously about self-identifying, belonging, and alignment and about statements in and of themselves. This confuses things and makes discussion overly personal.

@itfgothicno6 Connected to this, on Twitter words are *live*, rather than inert as they are on a page. A tweet is not just an abstract proposition, but an *act* and *signal*. Consequently, Twitter is probably more about reading between the lines than about reading the lines themselves.

@itfgothicno6 This encourages lots of cynical speech and cynical reading and heightens a hermeneutic of suspicion. You can't take a person's statement just as a statement, you need to divine how they are positioning themselves by it, how and to whom they are signalling, etc.

@itfgothicno6 Twitter moves far, far too quickly, discouraging careful deliberation and reflection, followed by considered response, and feeds kneejerk reaction.

@itfgothicno6 Twitter tends to elevate ideology, by removing the ballast of context and particularity. People on Twitter can seem like avatars of their favoured ideology, rather than people speaking and acting from complex identities, social contexts, backgrounds, and beliefs.

@itfgothicno6 And because shared contexts are lacking, people will tend to affiliate ideologically. And these ideologies, because they are about decontextualized tribal antagonisms, will tend to flatten out the complex realities to which they claim to relate.

@itfgothicno6 By removing boundaries of discourse, Twitter destroys the niches within which variegated thought and discourses can thrive. The result tends to be an antagonistic monoculture of discourse.

@itfgothicno6 The saturated sociality of Twitter also makes it difficult for us to have the breathing space to weigh things up privately and away from intense social pressure. New ideas come to us so entangled in our existing social antagonisms that we can't truly open ourselves up to them.

@itfgothicno6 Due to the dynamics of virality, Twitter amplifies issues that we sharply disagree about. It encourages each group to fixate upon the worst abuses of their adversaries, while failing to address the worst faults on their own sides.

@itfgothicno6 The result is constant alienating exposure to political others, rather than clarifying and moderating exchange.

Because it blinds us to persons, we are dulled to the ways strange or unhealthy thinking often arises from personal pain, mental health issues, neuroatypicality, etc.

@itfgothicno6 Consequently, there is little mercy or grace shown, whereas most of us would recognize that people we know in person are a lot more complex than their bad beliefs might suggest. And we can be firm friends with people with whom we have vast differences of belief.

@itfgothicno6 Then there is the way that Twitter blurs the difference between official and unofficial speech, public and private speech, publicized and obscure speech, serious and ironic speech, exploratory or tentative and firm or declarative speech, etc., etc.

@itfgothicno6 I could say a LOT, LOT more, but that is a start.

In constructing so much of our realm of discourse on Twitter we are building upon a swamp.