This is a very meta post but it’s something that you find every now and then. What you see is that people who make comments like this are aware of the ways that some of their friends and colleagues and acquaintances – or absolute strangers with views that might agree with their own, or else random folk who have differing views – use the sites (Facebook and, especially, Twitter). These are ways that set these places apart from a more usual site of community engagement, such as a pub or a party. There are no consequences online for poor behaviour and people’s identities are not as visible as they are in real life, so people say all sorts of things that they would never say in other, more traditional, contexts.
What the tweets contained in this post show is that there is an awareness in parts of the community of the rabidly partisan posting (on social media there is even a word for it: “shitposting”), especially from people on the left. What the frequency of the comments tells us is that people are generally unwilling to talk about it.
But despite this reticence about criticising fellow-travellers the bad behaviour is being noticed and the people who regret it, it is immediately clear, tend to be better-educated professionals. Such people have good expressive powers when it comes to written English, and they can do such things as use punctuation correctly, and they can spell. So the people whose comments appear below are different in certain ways from many of the people who are the worst abusers of Twitter, especially. In any case I have anonymised the comments.
There is another side to this survey however, and that is the feeling that despite the popularity of social media it remains a fairly superficial place due to the kinds of things that people post. This approach to SM has been around as long as people have been complaining about posts on Facebook showing what people ate for lunch. In fact, it is remarkable for its longevity. Of course, if you think Facebook is bad then you probably haven’t used Twitter much.
This survey started on 25 June and ended on 19 July, so it covers just under a month in time. I could have continued for longer but I decided to set limits and, in any case, I needed a post for today. This post follows one published on 12 July that was about complaints about the media on social media. But without any further ado, here are the complaints …
On 25 June at around 9am, a little-known Australian author, who wrote a book I had reviewed about an endangered species of bird, tweeted, “Good morning Twitter! I hope you’re all excited for another day on this hellsite. Let’s all try to have a positive outlook today: just remember, it’s CANcelled, not CAN’Tcelled.” A minute later he added, “Ahh, there it goes, my worst tweet yet.” At the time these tweets went up, he had 1562 followers and was following 627 people and had made just over 48,400 tweets from his account. I had reviewed his most recent book in 2018 and at that time he had not responded to my tweet with a link to the review, which was mixed.
On 29 June at 9.27am, a man who used to work for the ABC tweeted, “Shout out to tweeps who treat social media as the ‘tumble dryer of ideas’ and conflate totally unrelated subjects, keep it linear like Le Corbusier.”
On 30 June at 4.42pm a journalist I follow retweeted a tweet from a US-based journalist (who had a Middle Eastern name) that said, “Twitter in a nutshell.” The tweet came with a video attached that showed two fish, each of which had its burrow in the sand on the bottom of the sea. One fish would collect some sand and rocks in its mouth and swim over the its opponent’s burrow, then spit out the rubble so that it dropped on top of the other fish. In the video, which ran for 33 seconds, the two fish exchanged a number of these rubble dumps. The original journalist’s tweet had had 4000 “likes” and 1000 retweets.
On 6 July at 11.26am a New York IT professional I follow retweeted a tweet that had gone up a couple of minutes before from a San Francisco resident who used to work at Amazon. The tweet said, “People on Twitter when they see someone else trying to claim the moral high ground.” It came with a short video that showed a high-definition computer-generated animation sequence. In it, a man carrying a spade runs across a field and approaches what looks like a wooden ramp that leads up in the air. With his spade he strikes the supports of the ramp and it flies up into the air and dissolves in a whirl of smoke and flames.
On 8 July at 3.34am a UK novelist with 26,931 followers tweeted, “Don’t delete your old tweets. They can be recycled and sent to parts of the world where there is a desperate shortage of ill-informed opinions.” The tweet was retweeted by a Sydney man with 1328 followers the next day at around 5.35pm.
On 10 July at 7.40pm an account run by a man named Tim with 9581 followers tweeted, “’Media freedom’ now means silencing voices that UK [Foreign and Commonwealth Office] does not agree with? Those of us still able to exercise freedom of thought and expression ought to use this and speak out. Truth comes from allowing, not suppressing, a plurality of views.” The tweet came with a story on his own website titled, “Should Universities Care About The Truth?” The next day at 10.13pm I saw the tweet and replied, “A plurality of views is exactly what most progressives on Twitter hate. For them, there is one correct view for every issue. Expressing a different view will just attract scorn and hatred.” The person (a Melbourne account with 79 followers) who had retweeted Tim’s tweet replied to me, “They are faux-gressives. The real progressives are opposed to censorship and tech dictatorship.”
On 11 July at 10.38pm a history academic with 29,373 followers, tweeted, “as a woman on this hell-site I am concerned that apparently we're not *currently* playing in dark mode.” The tweet came with an image that showed a screenshot of Twitter’s online ad for its new interface.
On 13 July at 1pm an account with 416 followers tweeted a cartoon with the comment, “Me on Twitter.” The cartoon showed two people, one of who says in the first frame, “Let’s not talk about politics anymore, I can’t bear it.” Her companion says, “Same.” The next frame shows them sitting in silence. In the third frame, the first person says, “The thing is though ..” and the second person says, “Those fucking idiots ..”
What the tweets contained in this post show is that there is an awareness in parts of the community of the rabidly partisan posting (on social media there is even a word for it: “shitposting”), especially from people on the left. What the frequency of the comments tells us is that people are generally unwilling to talk about it.
But despite this reticence about criticising fellow-travellers the bad behaviour is being noticed and the people who regret it, it is immediately clear, tend to be better-educated professionals. Such people have good expressive powers when it comes to written English, and they can do such things as use punctuation correctly, and they can spell. So the people whose comments appear below are different in certain ways from many of the people who are the worst abusers of Twitter, especially. In any case I have anonymised the comments.
There is another side to this survey however, and that is the feeling that despite the popularity of social media it remains a fairly superficial place due to the kinds of things that people post. This approach to SM has been around as long as people have been complaining about posts on Facebook showing what people ate for lunch. In fact, it is remarkable for its longevity. Of course, if you think Facebook is bad then you probably haven’t used Twitter much.
This survey started on 25 June and ended on 19 July, so it covers just under a month in time. I could have continued for longer but I decided to set limits and, in any case, I needed a post for today. This post follows one published on 12 July that was about complaints about the media on social media. But without any further ado, here are the complaints …
On 25 June at around 9am, a little-known Australian author, who wrote a book I had reviewed about an endangered species of bird, tweeted, “Good morning Twitter! I hope you’re all excited for another day on this hellsite. Let’s all try to have a positive outlook today: just remember, it’s CANcelled, not CAN’Tcelled.” A minute later he added, “Ahh, there it goes, my worst tweet yet.” At the time these tweets went up, he had 1562 followers and was following 627 people and had made just over 48,400 tweets from his account. I had reviewed his most recent book in 2018 and at that time he had not responded to my tweet with a link to the review, which was mixed.
On 29 June at 9.27am, a man who used to work for the ABC tweeted, “Shout out to tweeps who treat social media as the ‘tumble dryer of ideas’ and conflate totally unrelated subjects, keep it linear like Le Corbusier.”
On 30 June at 4.42pm a journalist I follow retweeted a tweet from a US-based journalist (who had a Middle Eastern name) that said, “Twitter in a nutshell.” The tweet came with a video attached that showed two fish, each of which had its burrow in the sand on the bottom of the sea. One fish would collect some sand and rocks in its mouth and swim over the its opponent’s burrow, then spit out the rubble so that it dropped on top of the other fish. In the video, which ran for 33 seconds, the two fish exchanged a number of these rubble dumps. The original journalist’s tweet had had 4000 “likes” and 1000 retweets.
On 6 July at 11.26am a New York IT professional I follow retweeted a tweet that had gone up a couple of minutes before from a San Francisco resident who used to work at Amazon. The tweet said, “People on Twitter when they see someone else trying to claim the moral high ground.” It came with a short video that showed a high-definition computer-generated animation sequence. In it, a man carrying a spade runs across a field and approaches what looks like a wooden ramp that leads up in the air. With his spade he strikes the supports of the ramp and it flies up into the air and dissolves in a whirl of smoke and flames.
On 8 July at 3.34am a UK novelist with 26,931 followers tweeted, “Don’t delete your old tweets. They can be recycled and sent to parts of the world where there is a desperate shortage of ill-informed opinions.” The tweet was retweeted by a Sydney man with 1328 followers the next day at around 5.35pm.
On 10 July at 7.40pm an account run by a man named Tim with 9581 followers tweeted, “’Media freedom’ now means silencing voices that UK [Foreign and Commonwealth Office] does not agree with? Those of us still able to exercise freedom of thought and expression ought to use this and speak out. Truth comes from allowing, not suppressing, a plurality of views.” The tweet came with a story on his own website titled, “Should Universities Care About The Truth?” The next day at 10.13pm I saw the tweet and replied, “A plurality of views is exactly what most progressives on Twitter hate. For them, there is one correct view for every issue. Expressing a different view will just attract scorn and hatred.” The person (a Melbourne account with 79 followers) who had retweeted Tim’s tweet replied to me, “They are faux-gressives. The real progressives are opposed to censorship and tech dictatorship.”
On 11 July at 10.38pm a history academic with 29,373 followers, tweeted, “as a woman on this hell-site I am concerned that apparently we're not *currently* playing in dark mode.” The tweet came with an image that showed a screenshot of Twitter’s online ad for its new interface.
On 13 July at 1pm an account with 416 followers tweeted a cartoon with the comment, “Me on Twitter.” The cartoon showed two people, one of who says in the first frame, “Let’s not talk about politics anymore, I can’t bear it.” Her companion says, “Same.” The next frame shows them sitting in silence. In the third frame, the first person says, “The thing is though ..” and the second person says, “Those fucking idiots ..”
On the same day at 8.15pm a tweet came from an account with 19,277 followers that is owned by a Scot who is the chief marketing officer with a company that provides products for subsea wireless automation. The tweet had a meme in the form of an image with four frames showing the same man in four different scenes, as though he were a movie actor. In one photo he is shown eating snacks in his living room. This photo is labelled “In real life.” The second photo shows the man with no shirt on looking masuline. This photo is labelled “Instagram.” In the third photo the man is shown with a Hawaiian shirt on and red marks on his face as though he had been in a fight. This photo is labelled “Twitter.” The fourth photo shows the man in a uniform looking decisive. This photo is labelled “LinkedIn.”
The morning of the next day I saw a link to a news story that had come in a tweet with a photo of the same man, so I was able to know that this is the actor David Harbour who acts in the Netflix program ‘Stranger Things’. The Hawaiian shirt reference in the “Twitter” frame is to what Millennials think is Boomer men’s preferred form of clothing. Personally, I only wore Hawaiian shirts when I lived in southeast Queensland, where the climate is very warm. The use of the Hawaiian shirt in this frame is both ironic and deprecating, and au fond constitutes a kind of oblique compliment to the older generation.
There were a lot of amusing contributions to this survey, including a tweet on 14 July at 10.53am from an account with 58,903 followers that tweeted an image containing text. The text read:
At first she thought something happened at Trump International Hotel and tower, she said.
Police officers waved people out of the Columbus Circle subway station around 7:30 p.m. The Shops at Columbus Circle was evacuated shortly after.
Police officers and civilians worked together to direct traffic while fire trucks and ambulances screamed down side streets. Two young women posed for a selfie in the middle of 46th Street before an officer rushed over and chastised them, saying, “Ladies, this is not the time.”
The tweeter added, in a comment, “American civilization circa 2019, the social edition.”
To finish off on a positive note, on 15 July an account I follow with 4599 followers tweeted, “The hellsite blessed me with one of the most sage, kindhearted and insightful friends IRL. Scientists need to clone [Twitter handle erased] ASAP and what better day to start the process than on his birthday today. Hope you have the very best day mate!”
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