Much of
this column, by Haberman at the NYT, is what you always read about social media: some mean and trollish things are said. But that's been true all along, so it doesn't explain why Maggie Haberman needed to get out of a place where she'd been writing for a long time. I'm slogging through the generic critique of Twitter, looking for the specific.
Haberman's
announcement that she was taking a "break" from Twitter came last Sunday, and her new column begins, "I woke up last Sunday morning feeling anxiety in my chest as I checked the Twitter app on my phone...." So it's possible that it's all about a worrisome
physical symptom. Or perhaps she'd already hated the pressure to tweet and the physical symptom gave her the nerve or the leverage to tell the people at the NYT she wasn't going to do that part of the job anymore.
She presents herself as free to make her own choice not to tweet:
The evening before, I had complained to a close friend that I hated being on Twitter. It was distorting discourse, I said. I couldn’t turn off the noise. She asked what was the worst that could happen if I stepped away from it. There was nothing I could think of. And so just after 6 p.m. last Sunday, I did.
After nearly nine years and 187,000 tweets, I have used Twitter enough to know that it no longer works well for me. I will re-engage eventually, but in a different way.
Is it a purely individual decision like this and not part of what her employers expect her to do?
I remember when I started blogging and loved it and began encouraging my law school colleagues to do it too, nearly all of them were wary — mostly about the time it would take and the distraction — and many of them quickly leapt to the question: Are we going to be
required to blog? So, often, over the years, I've thought about how different blogging would be if it were required. Basically, it would be no good at all! The intrinsic good feeling of self-expression would be overwhelmed by annoyance at a disembodied Ghost of Obligation leaning over me, judging me:
Have I done enough? In fact, part of what made blogging so energizing for me was the concern that I
shouldn't be doing this, that it was transgressive. I've never had the feeling that I'm doing what I'm
supposed to, and if that feeling crept into my blogging, I'd change my pattern one way or another.
You may notice that I hardly ever tweet. I'm immersed in the blog, where I have so much choice about what to talk about and how things look on the front page. On Twitter, you have to continually throw things into a big flowing river, and you don't know how or if they float by in whatever it is someone else is seeing when they look at Twitter. It's so unstable and ephemeral. The only way to be more than a meaningless glimmer is if you get other people to boost you with retweets and responses, making people do things — that is, manipulating. And you have to do it constantly, or you're nothing in Twitter. Where did all your work go? You can click on your name and see a page of all you've written, but that doesn't seem to be where anyone else goes. Why are you participating in this immense group project?
But then blogging isn't my job. And tweeting
really isn't my job. I would have thought tweeting was part of Haberman's job and that she has extracted an accommodation from her employer. But she does not address the journalist's
obligation to tweet.
She does say that what's bad about Twitter has become worse lately: "The viciousness, toxic partisan anger, intellectual dishonesty, motive-questioning and sexism are at all-time highs..." Who knows if that's true? Oh, no! I'm
motive-questioning!
And it's not just the quality, it's the quantity:
Everyone I follow on the site seems to be tweeting more frequently, so I had to check in more frequently. No matter the time of day or night, I felt like I had to plug back into the Matrix, only to be overwhelmed by the amount of content.
And, finally, she sneaks up on the subject of Trump:
On Twitter, everything is shrunk down to the same size, making it harder to discern what is a big deal and what is not. Tone often overshadows the actual news. All outrages appear equal. And that makes it harder for significant events — like Mr. Trump’s extraordinarily pliant performance with President Vladimir Putin of Russia — to break through.
Well, yeah, but Haberman pulled back on Twitter the day before the summit. But I see the awful problem. Everyone's writing constantly trying to be seen and that requires even more writing so that you can be seen. And it's got to be galling when what you want seen is how terrible Trump is, and there's Trump, not just being President, but dominating on Twitter...
Ooh! Must we talk about that?!
Back to Haberman:
[P]eople on Twitter have started... treating me as if I am a protagonist [antagonist?] in the president’s narrative. I found myself in the middle of swarms of vicious Twitter attacks, something that has happened to many other journalists in the Trump era. He creates the impression that the media is almost as powerful as he is in his incessant, personalized attacks on reporters on Twitter. But here’s the thing: Most of us don’t want to be part of the story.
Or... don't want to be part of the story when he's able to be right there on the same platform and taking the liberty to
attack you directly and by name. But why wouldn't you want to stay in there, putting up your tweets, defending your work and your reputation, where it will surely be retweeted and amplified by other journalists?
ADDED: Rereading this post, I'm seeing "what made blogging so energizing for me was the concern that I
shouldn't be doing this, that it was transgressive" and thinking
Trump... that's how Trump feels about tweeting... and maybe about being President.
পোস্টগুলি
