I recently read Rutger Bregman's "Humankind" (original Dutch tile: Most people are kind), and it really seems to be true, I like the optimistic tone of the book and perhaps it's indeed robbing you of beautiful experiences when you are to distrustful towards others... And then there is twitter. Like a filter for the worst of the worst, I just stay away from it. Twitter helps me with that because having no account means that every encounter ends in that curse inducing black screen when you're half way into reading a tweet and the back button doesn't even work.
You may recall the advice about waiting til next morning to hit send on that scathing email reply. You might not feel so dramatic after a cooldown period.
My working theory on why Twitter is so noxious is that it captures (then broadcasts) people's impulsiveness reaction.
I keep thinking of Marshal McLuhan's The Medium is the Message. What would he say about Twitter?
I've never grokked McLuhan's distinction between "hot" and "cold" mediums. (Makes sense; being one of the first to discuss this stuff, he had to invent a vocabulary.)
My current guess involves feedback loops and channel bandwidth. "Hot" is reactive, "cold" is deliberative. But it's not just the immediacy of the medium, it's also the interactions (feedback loops).
Face to face, there is very high bandwidth (included by not limited to backchannel, body language, facial expressions, context, etc) along with rapid feedback. So we have the information needed to keep communication from going off the rails.
Alas, Twitter's very constrained bandwidth, while maintaining the rapid feedback loop, doesn't permit any sort collaborative moderating effort.
In other words, Twitter is custom built for kneejerk clapbacks.
For contrast, I keep thinking of John Carmack's journaling via a .plan file (and the finger protocol). Twas a precursor to blogging and RSS feeds. Why didn't that medium incite virality, outrage, and pogroms? .plan files are also low band width, right? I think it's because the feedback loops simply didn't exist.
My theory about Twitter is that the UI makes it feel like you are interacting in a really small group (by constraining how much you can see at any one time), when in reality you are broadcasting to an audience of possibly many thousands. This produces speech and behaviour people would use with only close friends, but to a huge audience.
If you were just with one other programming friend, you might make reference to a repo you'd seen and say something like "yeah that approach is totally batshit", but you wouldn't say the same thing to the author in a public forum in front of many people. I think Twitter tricks our minds into behaving like the former but actually in the latter. So it's easy to forget that you may as well be directly insulting the author.
Agreed. Clay Shirky made a similar point in Here Comes Everybody. Or maybe it was Cognitive Surplus. (Crap, sorry, it's been a while.)
His analogy, IIRC: teens treat social media as hanging out at the food court with friends, not as public speech. To them, adults eavesdropping are the creeps, not the kids just being kids. Like, why would adults even be listening? It's just gross.
I've elucidated about this somewhere before, but I view this perspective as a little too cynical for my taste. I think exposure to public perceptions shapes people into more civil individuals, and this can translate to private life.
A good simple example is the way people tend to tidy their house before having guests. The cleanliness isn't "false" by most people's view.
Edit: Another perspective is that people use the company of trusted friends as a staging area for shaping their own nuanced positions. It's safer.
Again, totally agree. Cognition is social. Our social context can inhibit or boost our impulses. Starting with our inner voice all the way to global broadcast.
Isn't Twitter a counterexample to the conjecture "Most people are kind"? I also don't have a Twitter account. And I'm happy too keep it that way.
But bad people don't cease to exist if you stop reading their tweets.
In the past 100 years, we had Auschwitz, the killing fields, the gulags in USSR, genocides in central Africa, human trafficking, child abuse, and many other crimes against humanity.
I don't see how people can decide within a couple of decades that, nevertheless, "most people are kind". There is a monster hiding in all of us. And it doesn't go away by ignoring it. Instead we should acknowledge it, and tame it. Because otherwise it will burst forth unexpectedly, and a new Hitler or Stalin is born.
They are affected by physical proximity, eye contact, body language,
tone of voice, even smell.
They lack the courage to be hostile to strangers who may possibly
retaliate with physical force.
Deeply entrenched socialisation and group norms operate mostly
on the inter-personal, face-to-face level.
These controls are so strong that people are quite unable to
dehumanise others when face to face. See Andrew Kimbrall's 2000
Schumacher lecture [1] (in particular the story of the pilot shot down
in Vietnam).
Mass communications technology really requires we relearn our entire
stack of socialisation skills using different signals and different
brain faculties. Nobody is taught that. Nobody today has time for
that.
Rutger Bregman's "Humankind" is actually presenting a lot of (convincing) evidence towards the hypothesis that the vast vast majority of people are in fact kind, and have been throughout most of our recent history. This is thus also evidence for the statement "Twitter is a cesspool of the worst of the worst of us", although we may ask: Is it really? Or does "the algorithm" bring out the worst and to the surface? Does Twitter repel kind people?
These are interesting, even very important questions imho.
It's an interesting question on a different level than individual
choice/behaviour.
In real life, most people shun being associated with a socially
ostracised outlaw group, deviants or extremists. Even for actual
criminals, deviants or extremists, we don't like to be labelled and
lumped in with the others - except where a group is oppressed by
obvious social-injustice, which engenders a sense of pride in
belonging.
Twitter, is, as far as I can see, widely recognised as "cesspool of
the worst of the worst of us". And I have never perceived Twitter as
some sort of oppressed minority unable to find a voice in society. Yet
people choose to remain on the platform, and some have even built
their entire identity and life around it.
I think this is because the old media sought to legitimise it. They've
worked very hard for a long time to bury the tawdry and unacceptable
side of it.
Solzhenitsyn demonstrated that the Soviet Union was built on the lies of the ordinary people. It wasn't just some rotten apples at the top of the ruling class. It was rotten to the core. The vast majority of people were lying. To others and to themselves.
I think it's really scary to ignore this, and pat ourselves on our back, and say that we're pretty kind after all. Of course I agree that in a peaceful civilization, a lot of people are pretty kind on the surface. But there's stuff lurking underneath the surface. And once we start preaching that this isn't really there, a lot of bad stuff can happen.
There's war going on right now. And it's not just Putin that is evil. There are thousands of people actively participating in this war. Shooting others. The could decide to do something else, yet they don't.
I think that one of the theses in Tolstoy's War and Peace is that these big wars aren't just the products of some bad apples at the top. He presents Napoleon as something like a puppet, driven by deeper forces that we barely understand.
We should have more respect for these deeper chaotic forces, that we barely understand.
