twitter

Posted: 2025-02-25

Tags: personal

some brief thoughts on twitter and writing, towards something more substantial about my experience of the internet and thoughts on its development.

i think it’s obvious that writing has power, namely that it converts thoughts into something concrete that can then be further manipulated by thought and refined, criticized, and developed productively. but do all thoughts deserve to be written? twitter encourages writing down all sorts of thoughts but of course the format and the resulting social ranking system of likes, retweets, and replies gives your thoughts an external “objective function” that probably causes you to change your thinking behaviour to maximize engagement while penalizing longer thoughts. of course “engagement” as a goal will be different from person to person; learning somebody i like has read a thought of mine via a like is worth more than a more substantial engagement like a reply from a total stranger. aside from the suggestion that using twitter might be subjecting your mind to an optimization problem that you may not actually want it to be subject to, i also wonder if thought itself is best left alone for the most part. as writing makes thoughts concrete, perhaps there are thoughts that shouldn’t be made concrete. maybe most thoughts are like exhaust or waste heat, and giving waste thoughts too much attention is a bad idea. most thoughts might be foam on the sea surface, granted a momentary existence by deeper currents heralding the eventual emergence of an actually worthwhile thought. some thoughts may be deleterious and encouraging their promulgation by fixing them in writing or simply choosing to work them over until they carve a rut in the mind would be harmful. as many meditation practices seek to demonstrate, the lifespans of thoughts and sensations are typically short; perhaps embalming a bunch of rapidly putrefying thoughts in text throughout the day is as perverse and unsanitary as this metaphor suggests. i want to be a bit more suspicious of the relationship between thought and writing.