Twitter nation holds an election
I never did watch last night’s debate. I got home towards the tail end of it, and I just didn’t have the energy to watch. Instead I read a bunch of comments at different sites, and that’s when it occurred to me—and not for the first time—that we’ve turned into Twitter nation and this election is the Twitter election.
I don’t use Twitter, and rarely read it. But I certainly check it out now and then, when there’s a tweet in the news that catches my eye. Right from the start Twitter held little interest for me, although a lot of bloggers took to it immediately. I suppose tweeting can also be very good to build readership, but I just can’t stomach it and don’t want to spend a moment of precious time doing it.
I’ve not only not been drawn to it, but something about it repels me. I used to think that “something” was just that I prefer lengthier, more fleshed-out thoughts, although I do understand the value of conciseness, and I like a short and witty bon mot as well as the next person, maybe more. Funny quips are great, and often quotable, but too steady a diet of them is like eating nothing but M&Ms.
To me, that’s what Twitter always was—a lot of people being snarky together, trading barbs to see who could be the most clever. Like a bunch of teenagers getting together after school in someone’s basement, having fun at everyone else’s expense.
Yes, some information is imparted now and then through Twitter, but it is usually of the “here’s a great thing I just did!” variety. So Twitter favors snarky one-liner put-downs and/or bragging. Those of you who like Twitter may say I’m selling it short, but every time I go there, that’s what I see and that’s about all I see.
Twitter began in the summer of 2006, and its growth curve went like this:
It had 400,000 tweets posted per quarter in 2007. This grew to 100 million tweets posted per quarter in 2008. In February 2010, Twitter users were sending 50 million tweets per day…As of March 2011, that was about 140 million tweets posted daily…
On March 21, 2012, Twitter celebrated its sixth birthday while also announcing that it has 140 million users and sees 340 million tweets per day…
As of September 2013, the company’s data showed that 200 million users send over 400 million tweets daily, with nearly 60% of tweets sent from mobile devices.
And now, we’ve got about 500 million tweets per day, and counting.
This research bears me out about content in Twitter (although it’s from 2009):
San Antonio-based market-research firm Pear Analytics analyzed 2,000 tweets (originating from the United States and in English) over a two-week period in August 2009 from 11:00 am to 5:00 pm (CST) and separated them into six categories:
Pointless babble ”“ 40%
Conversational ”“ 38%
Pass-along value ”“ 9%
Self-promotion ”“ 6%
Spam ”“ 4%
News ”“ 4%
In this particular election cycle of 2016, Twitter seems to dominate much more than before, and of course it is tailor-made for the strengths of Donald Trump. He has developed snarky one-liner put-downs and bragging to a fine art, and Twitter gives him the perfect platform for that, with a ready-made potential audience of many millions who are drawn to the game. Other candidates also are Twitter users—I’d say that, in this day and age, they must be—but Trump is a natural. I don’t know how many of all the candidates’ tweets are self-generated or if they use specially-trained Twitter assistants (with the candidates having the right of final approval of tweets, of course), but Twitter has been a very active factor in this election, more so than ever before.
Although this post focuses on Twitter, it’s not only Twitter. I’ve noticed over and over—on blogs, on television, in comments, in life—that snark has become the dominant conversational style, the coin of the realm these days. And the phenomenon is only growing.
Nearly everything is irony or mockery, coming from what appears to be a very deep public cynicism, fed in turn by the constant cynicism and mockery. No one is really laudable any more. Elect a narcissistic con man? Why not? They’re all narcissistic con men, so let’s back the conny-ist and most narcissistic con man of all. And let’s laugh about it, and taunt the opposition. Integrity is for suckers, and only saps would believe that anyone smart has it. Except, paradoxically, the snarky, who show the depth of their integrity by the depth of their mocking cynicism.
You might say in response that their cynicism is deserved: we’ve been betrayed by everyone, in government especially, Republicans and Democrats, they’re all lying thieves, yada yada yada. I’m not at all sure it’s that much worse than it used to be. But even if it is, it’s certainly not everyone, and what I see is an incessant, petulant, nit-picky fault-finding on the part of a public that rejects good (or good enough) people in public life for one mistake, one bad judgment, one intemperate remark, and tars them as forever beyond the pale.
The public wants—as I put it a while ago—madder music and stronger wine. Trump gives it to them today, but it needn’t be Trump—next cycle it will be someone else. It’s not about Trump, it’s about what the public has come to be interested in, and what the public demands.
Perhaps we will get the government we deserve. I certainly hope not. I hope we get a government much better than we deserve. But that’s not often the way it works, is it?
[NOTE: I tried to make that last paragraph come in under 140 characters (spaces apparently count as characters on Twitter, which has a nice symbolism to it), so it could qualify as tweet-length. Couldn’t quite do it without making it sound more stupid, so in the end I just let it be.]
The last two elections have been Facebook elections and now we have a Twitter election. It’s not an improvement. Social media is not a good platform for politics. The urge to press the “like” button or repeat a quick sick burn on Twitter is emotion-based, leads to a short-term high from “participating” in the “conversation,” but is not indicative of any thought whatsoever and precludes substantive exchange of ideas. That’s so old-fashioned. I have a lot of lefty friends on social media and they’re still proudly broadcasting the tired progressive “likes” and “snarks” (1 in 5 women, $15 minimum wage, [Republican]=Hitler, etc.] which have long-since been debunked. Bern and Hill still roll this stuff out so it must have resonance, even now. Why? Because we’re not listening to each other, we’re just exchanging insults.
AMartel:
I’m in complete agreement.
Scott Adams is enthralled with this ‘advance.’
Twitter is pure ‘1984’ crowd-think.
144 characters of snark replaces the 2 minute hate.
Grouping up — or out grouping.
High school clique politics scaled up something fierce.
Collectivism made digital … and retail.
As is often the case, I had an uncanny sense that you were speaking my mind when I read your thoughts about Twitter. I really don’t care for it. But, in a way, it is free expression taken to another (Higher? Lower?) level. How many of those hundreds of millions of tweets per day are simply parroting the usual tiresome progressive nostrums? And how much of that snark is swimming in a thick pool of fatuity, excessive sentimentality, ignorance and self-regard? Fortunately, we can still simply “not go there.” Stay away from the pool. As I have written before, one can well wonder whether Hitler could have ever come to power if there had been things like the Internet and (well, yes) Twitter. Makes for some interesting thumbsucking, doesn’t it? But one thing is for sure, Hitler in power, would have never permitted such venues of communication to exist, except as a heavily policed form of adulation and enforcement.
Hitler would never have permitted such venues of communication to exist … unless they were run by his corporate communications lieutenants who were getting political kick-backs/tax breaks/favors for ridding the platform of wrongthink!
Retweeters: Congratulations, you’re a parrot.
Use your own words!
Drop “certainly” and “often” and your last paragraph fits twitter. It also makes a much stronger impact.
boxty:
I was sort of joking. Of course it’s possible to edit it out. But it wouldn’t be exactly what I wanted to say, and I think it would sound (and be) more stupid.
Which was my point.
I know how to edit out words to make a sentence shorter. I do it all the time. But I won’t do it if it means I’d be saying something different—and more stupid—than what I’m thinking and meaning. And of course it makes a stronger impact!
If I want to write propaganda, I can write it. I’m not really interested in that.
The reason I used the word “often” in the last sentence of that phrase was that sometimes we do get a better government than we deserve.
According to numerous reports, young blacks are considerably more likely than whites to use Twitter, and it seems indisputable that Black Twitter has contributed to the many fabrications and disruptions linked to BLM.
Maybe you should have used the Menken quote: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/h/hlmencke163179.html
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
Oops. Misspelled Mencken.
David Aitken:
Been there, done that. 🙂
And Mencken is a name that almost cries out for misspelling.
Like the word “sherbet.”
Thank you for articulating exactly how I feel about twitter and the current election cycle.
“It is the known weakness of any government based on democratic principles, that it can never be any better than the people who elected it.”
So yes, we will get the government we deserve.
While agreeing almost completely w/ neo, I still enjoy reading some political tweets. I like looking at a few people like baseball crank, moe lane, allahpundit, jpodhoretz, etc. late at night. Late at night, tired and getting bleary eyed, their brevity is perfect if I still feel like reading. Some junk and some silly, but a good snapshot of other’s take on things.
Is it really snark?
Definition time: snark is a form of humor where you listen to your opponent expend energy on a certain point, and then respond by insulting something tangential or unrelated to the main point.
Its what Chelsie Handler does.
Snark has the confidence value of humor, because most people in a polite civilized society are unwilling to give snark the response it deserves.
Recent example of snark: the people who responded to the Republican debate “Why did Megyn Kelly change her haircut so it looks like Trump’s.”
What Donald Trump is doing on twitter is not snark, its what Aristotle would have called Rhetoric. Aristotle’s followers, focused on facts & logical proof, famously lost many democratic debates to the Sophists, who made arguments based on rhetoric, appeals to emotion.
Rhetoric works. Rhetoric beats facts and logic every time, except on audiences that agree on the facts ahead of time.
As America gets dumber and less aware of basic facts, rhetoric becomes more important.
And, recent neurological research shows that the parts of the brain that respond to rhetoric are three times as large as the parts that respond to reason.
Ted Cruz, the expert oral argument lawyer and college debate champ, has proven to be weak on emotion appealing rhetoric.
If you’d been paying attention to twitter, you would have seen Trump and his rhetoric coming ahead of time.
Rotten:
“Snark” comes from “snide” plus “remark,” and it is “an attitude or expression of mocking irreverence and sarcasm.” There’s no reason that a comment defined as Rhetoric (in the Aristotelian sense) couldn’t also be “snark” as in “a snide remark.” I don’t think the two things are mutually exclusive, although of course they don’t always go together, or even most of the time. Trump uses both, sometimes together and sometimes separately, as do his followers.
I have never heard “snark” (or “snarky,” a word I use more in my post than I do “snark”) defined as requiring “insulting something tangential or unrelated to the main point.”
I agree, though, about the appeal to emotion. And Trump’s use of it. Nor is every word out of Trump’s mouth “snark.”
I don’t think it’s surprising, either, that Trump has made great use of Twitter. It suits him perfectly, and you don’t have to be a Twitter aficionado to realize that it would.
Are you familiar with the concept of “gamification”? That’s the idea of introducing elements of game play into activities that aren’t normally considered to be games in order to encourage people to engage more strongly with a product or service. A lot of it is just marketing BS but sometimes it can be incredibly powerful, and Twitter is a prime example.
Twitter is a gamified instant messaging platform. It provides a basic IM platform and adds scoring mechanisms in the form of likes, followers and retweets. It encourages people to compete for public attention, and the initial reward for playing the game is the sense of personal validation that comes from other people agreeing with you and treating your opinions as important enough to repeat. But to raise your score and keep getting that validation you have to spend more and more time on Twitter. The more you do this the more it becomes a part of your identity. Gamification turns a mundane activity into a quest for a dopamine hit and thus gives it the power to become addictive.
When a debate turns into a flame war between rival social or political groups it becomes an online combat game. The partisans of each side form into ad hoc teams and try to destroy each other. Victory is gained by silencing the opposition through intimidation or sheer force of numbers. It’s like a text-based version of multi-player FPS (First Person Shooter) games like “Call of Duty”. Whenever you want to get your adrenaline flowing you just connect to the server, jump into a battle and frag anybody who is on the other team.
There is a role-playing element. The game is a competition for public attention so it encourages the players to say the most attention-grabbing things they can think of as loudly as they possibly can. It encourages them to create an exaggerated online persona that is only distantly related to their real selves and it rewards obnoxious egotistical behaviour. This is one of the negative aspects of gamification. Another risk is that the more people treat their daily activities as games the less seriously they will take them.
There is also an element of gambling. Twitter offers all its players the chance of posting something that goes viral and wins them a brief moment of global fame. There is also the possibility of getting noticed by the mainstream media and turning that attention-grabbing online persona into a lucrative career. In other words, it’s like buying a lottery ticket or sticking a dollar into a slot machine in Las Vegas. There are very few winners but the knowledge that somebody will win is enough to keep millions of people playing regularly.
Look at other social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest and you will see similar scoring mechanisms at work. If you want to understand the success of social media and what impact it might have on society you need to look into the psychology of gamification.
AndrewZ:
Believe me, I understand it only too well (although I wasn’t familiar with the term). It’s no mystery. I just don’t like to play that game, and I think that more and more people participating is harmful to society, and ultimately to all of us. But the attraction is very, very clear.
You gave a good description of it, though.
AndrewZ Says:
January 29th, 2016 at 8:12 pm
* * *
Outstanding analysis.
Can we apply it to the gamification of politics in general?
If you want to understand the success of social media and what impact it might have on society you need to look into the psychology of gamification.
It’s just another rat maze for those experimenting on mice.
“It’s just another rat maze for those experimenting on mice.”
Exactly.
Beware of shattering too many people’s most cherished illusions. These days you can probably get sued for it.
In spite of AMartel’s sound injunction to use my own words, I cannot help think of this from Lewis’ Srewtape Letters:
“But flippancy is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny.
“Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it.
“If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armour-plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter.
“It is a thousand miles away from joy it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practice it.”
Twitter is the “bumper sticker” medium of the all social media.
Well said. The most insightful bit, for me, is that Twitter use and reliance indicates a cynicism about politics, government, and leadership. Skepticism is healthy, cynicism is destructive. We reap what we sow. Will be interesting to see how this all plays out and what results from it.