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At the very least is a workable hypothesis. To be active on Twitter one needs the right personality, which means being very upset when other people reply/engage or being indifferent and playing one of the games adults are playing. In the first case, the person is not able to avoid engaging. In the second case, they engage because they have the usual "motives". Twitter is a very dangerous social media. I consider myself a wordly and experienced person, but I admit I tend to over-value what is shared on Twitter (momentarily, because I look back occasionally at bookmarks and I have very little or no memories of those tweets or I cannot understand why I bookmarked them).
I over-value (and not properly value) because I have no clue who is the person who's tweeting (case 1, why should I listen to them? Who are they? Would the same observation "hold" is a face to face conversation?) or I know them/they are public figures (case 2), and they are playing a game of popularity or relevance in which I am, as part of the audience, the sucker. Just to make an example, the other day someone wrote that "the US should ramp up oil production now". I read it and I told myself "Ok". A reply-guy replied "what are you talking about, this is not like software, when you can "easily" scale up the number of servers". And I thought, man, I was really not thinking, my first reaction when reading a twitter should be "this is bs, who is this person, where is the competence coming from, what it the game they are playing now", but it was not my first reaction, which was instead of passive acceptance.
Dangerous game. |
I think the character limit creates a blunt form of communication that leads to this toxic environment. It is practically designed to create misunderstandings and dismissive short responses to those misunderstandings.