DEREK MULLER: The Rise And Fall of My Use of Twitter.

There have been increased attempts from Twitter to tell me what I ought to believe is important, a new kind of filter to the experience. Trending stories are the first in that effort. Moments, another. Autocompleting search terms or displaying preferred search results, still another. And occasionally, it will display “live” events at the top of my feed that it believes I ought to heed. In each of these circumstances, I’ve found the content offensive–not because it somehow offended my morals, but because it was so utterly trivial and banal that I wondered why it would, in its vaunted algorithmic way, decide I would have any interest in these silly and trite things.

I have found that the reward from “status” on Twitter is simply not great. For journalism, it remains, sadly, nearly ubiquitous. A majority of media inquiries now start from a tweet; indeed, a non-trivial number of media mentions fail to even inquire of me and simply (lazily) cite my tweet. Using Twitter less means fewer citations in journalists’ pieces, but such is the tradeoff. Furthermore, I’ve found that a lot of media now focuses on what people say on Twitter, and then how others react to those statements on Twitter–a deeply meta, and often, I think, deeply superficial, way of thinking about newsworthiness. . . .

And perhaps most of all, I found visiting Twitter a joyless, even painful, experience. It was a chore, or a necessity, not a pleasant way of learning about the news. If it’s not the banal, it’s the stranger shouting angrily, or the self-laudatory sarcastic point that demolishes or obliterates or decimates one’s (usually political) enemies. I found my blood pressure too quickly and easily rise. I found myself defensive, typing out a hasty or angry or sarcastic response, only to delete it. (Occasionally it escaped my self-editing, to my detriment, I think.)

I would find myself thinking lamenting the lack of subtlety. Or, more significantly, the lack of the ability to have an actual conversation. I found total strangers willing to say consistently hurtful things (fortunately, only rarely to me; too often, to many undeserving targets). I saw the herd mentality of social media, where errors spread like wildfire or outraged mobs congregate. I found that many of the cutting tweeters would be perfectly pleasant to have a conversation, even a disagreement, with when face to face, perhaps for hours over a meal. Twitter has been destructive to that end, at least for me.

It’s hard to argue.