Read on Twitter
there's something I've been half-thinking about for a year or so, and the universal experience of the lockdown has kind of brought it into sharper relief, so I'm going to have a stab at putting it into words:
I don't think the problem with the internet is that we now live in bubbles. I think the problem with the internet is that we're all together, all the time, and that's not something humans are built for. We're not made to be constant; people will always change what they say, and
how they say it, depending on who they're talking to, not because they're two-faced but because we're inherently social and that means adapting ourselves to who's in front of us. Social media changed that, obviously, but it's still how we think about what we say a lot of the time
You see it in memes about posting IG stories purely for your crush, or in what we've grown to call "virtue signalling", eg tweeting out certain statements to reinforce your status as the member of a group. The issue is that it doesn't mirror the reality of the internet;
Even if you didn't have some of your followers in mind when you posted something, they will still see it. Even if they're someone you know, it can be an issue; just because you're at a house party with friends doesn't mean you'd want what you said in the kitchen to be
broadcast to the whole flat. And so what is meant for an in-group will still be seen by various other groups, who may not see it as such, and take it to be a statement to their own in-group. To take the lockdown as an example - I live alone, have no kids, and have
boundless amounts of energy. What I want to read and talk about is how to busy myself for the next few months; I want to be productive, both because I can and because I will go insane if I don't. But for every me there's at least one other person who's working full-time,
having to juggle kids and keep a house running, and so each tweet of mine desperately asking for ways to fill my free time will feel alien at best, taunting at worst. What she wants to see is people giving tips on how to find time to relax, and reassurances that
it is fine not to be coping. To me, these posts are grating; what I get from them is the implication I should be grateful for my situation, or hints that I'm being off-puttingly smug, neither of which I recognise, as this is tough for all of us, but in different ways.
And I think that fundamentally, you cannot ask people to always eg. tweet with absolutely every account on Twitter in mind; that's not how our brains work, and it would suck all the joy of social media out of it. Instead, we may need to collectively learn that just because
someone has posted something on a public platform, it doesn't mean that everyone was always the intended audience. Just like you wouldn't intervene in a conversation people are having in a queue despite you being able to hear them loud and clear, maybe we need to
accept that social spaces online can only be made better if we recognise that we've all been squashed together in one space, and we all have different lives and views and experiences and problems, and maybe we need to learn how to build those bubbles for ourselves;
not at platform level, as we're clearly using apps like Twitter that are made better by having open profiles, but informally, and at topic or person level; realise that even if something was tweeted into our timeline, maybe it wasn't tweeted for us. It will take effort
and I don't believe it will feel natural at first, but I don't really see how else we can all keep living together in this one place without driving each other mad.
