I have so many linguistic thoughts about the way conversations happen on Twitter, but I’m afraid to tweet them because of the way conversations happen on Twitter.

But they’re, like, real smart y’all.

Nope I’m gonna do it. I’m depressed and need to feel fear to feel alive.

Just know that I’m NOT saying we shouldn’t hold people accountable for their actions, nor am I trying to tone police. I’m merely analyzing, linguistically, why conversations happen like they do on Twitter, and why we’re all feeling so miserable right now.

Basically, Twitter gives us the illusion of f2f social interaction but removes nuance and context, but their are enough... tricks of the light that we don’t realize that’s happening.

This is asynchronous computer-mediated-discourse (CMD) masquerading as synchronous face-to-face conversation, and we keep trying to get around the constraints of the medium through using all these analogs for paralanguage (tone, body language, etc), and it’s just not working.

All the paralinguistic restitution (gifs, internet grammar, punctuation) in the world can’t make up for having a living, breathing human in front of you with all their reactions and feelings and humanness.

And then add on the fact that the app rewards us for performing only *certain* emotions, we’re being conditioned to participate in a negatively-skewed reality where the only serotonin boosts we get are from amplification of our pain and trauma and anger.

(Not to say that those emotions aren’t important and don’t deserve to be discussed. But that more positive emotions aren’t as rewarded (liked, shared). Anecdote/observation: the tweets of mine that have gotten the most traction are the ones where I share my own trauma.)

(Also, I would never accept anecdotal or observational evidence in a student paper, but these are just my Twitter thoughts, not an academic argument.)

Basically, we’re trying to have synchronous f2f conversation through a medium that only pretends to support that genre of communication, trying to use the same rules and expecting them to work.

So we all end up shouting over each other about our pain, thinking we’re having a conversation. But it’s an illusion because of how the medium is constructed. The conversation isn’t moving forward. It’s all happening simultaneously, individually. Not together or constructively.

So what do we do with this? Yeah, Idk. Communication practices don’t change by committee. They evolve naturally. But I also don’t think it’ll hurt to be more aware of structurally how conversations happen on Twitter & start to adjust our own communication practices accordingly.