t's one of the great mysteries of our time: does using Twitter make people stupid,
or is there something about social media that brings out the more depressing
aspects of human behavior?
Twitter is a social medium in its purest form. Participants form social networks and select who they follow based on popularity. Of the top fifty most-followed accounts, 24 are pop entertainers like Katy Perry and Justin Bieber, with over 100 million followers each. The most re-tweeted tweet of all time, with 3,624,000 re-tweets, is a request by some guy who wanted free chicken nuggets. Many tweets are expressions of anger and hate, but the most popular (measured by number of “likes”) are upbeat expressions of some emotional feeling, by people like Barack Obama and pop culture figures. One survey found that 40.1% of tweets were pointless babble, and only 3.6% contained news. What is going on?
My theory is that Twitter was an experiment to determine whether it's possible to present a coherent argument, say something intelligent and thoughtful, or express a defensible position on some topic in 140 characters or less. The experiment succeeded, and we now know the answer: no it is not.
Twitter tried everything: raising the limit to 280 characters, “verifying” accounts to confirm that the sender is approved by Twitter management, censoring opinions that its leaders found discomfiting, and even getting rid of millions of what it claimed were “fake“ accounts.
None of these can work because the problems in Twitter arise from group psychology. Twitter's format encourages emotionalism and discourages depth. Many people discovered that the ability to express hatred anonymously was fun. The difference was that Twitter made it easy, painless, and consequence-free, and it allowed people to convince themselves that they were admired for doing so. Twitter is not about sharing wisdom; its purpose is to promote collective social behavior.
What if the minimum tweet were set to 5,000 words? This would force people to learn how to string thoughts together to make a coherent argument. They'd have to make it interesting and readable, and back up what they say with logic. Writing a tweet makes it easy for even an intelligent, thoughtful person to look like a moron. Forcing them to write a whole article would mean they'd have to work harder at it.
Social pathologies
Twitter is also associated with social justice warriors, social exclusion, bullying, and hatred. These social pathologies cannot be eliminated from Twitter because they're a fundamental aspect of how humans interact. Twitter's values—judging trends by their popularity and censoring ideas that the crowd dislikes—are characteristic of group behavior.
As one wise woman once said about math, thinking is tough. When you're forced to create an entire argument, you often realize that your original idea was wrong, irrelevant, or unconvincing. Even bloggers often cross out entire sections of stuff and re-write articles from scratch. Twitterization short-circuits this process, allowing the initial impulse, often highly emotionalized and inchoate, to be expressed. Twitterers rarely come up with good ideas, not because they can't, but because the medium discriminates against good ideas.
Twitter, like Wikipedia, is founded on the theory of the wisdom of crowds. This theory says that a crowd has a variety of viewpoints and therefore can reach a better conclusion than experts.
While it may be true that everyone has an important story to tell, the experience of social media has proved that the theory that crowds have wisdom is false. Those articles on Wikipedia, such as those on theoretical physics, that are most clearly written and contain the most accurate facts, are generally written by grad students and individuals with authoritative knowledge in their field. Nontechnical articles are the most representative of the wisdom of crowds and tend to be biased, political, and full of falsehoods.
Twitter is a pure distillation of the latter. As the 19th century psychologist Gustave Le Bon wrote, a crowd exists not by shared wisdom, but by shared stupidity. In a demotic medium catering to crowds, making an authoritative comment is nearly impossible. Both Twitter mobs and emotionalism are classic pathologies of group behavior.
There's an easy technological solution. The results of the Twitter experiment are in. There is no such thing as the wisdom of crowds. My advice: Write 'em up, close down the format, and move on to the next grand experiment.
jul 24 2018, 4:53 am
