I was talking with a friend recently, about young people. 20~ year old creatives that we interact with, or, at least try to. That was the sticking point for both of us, that there's a contingent of these people that seem shallow at first glance, or inattentive, or something. They don't really talk much, they just post their content, then leave. This seems like a personal failing. But on second glance, maybe it isn't them at all. After all, what's the difference between them and us? Time, obviously, but what else?
Twitter.
I hate Twitter. So does my friend. But thinking on it, most younger artists have grown up with it- with the social media landscape in general, for which Twitter is so emblematic. Gallery websites have become less important than these gigantic megahubs wherein everyone congregates- and I do mean everyone, demographically speaking.
What's the big deal? We had online talking places, too. All of us old enough remember the heyday of online forums, or mailing lists if you're even older, used them to communicate. So what's the difference between a Twitter thread and a BBS thread?
Well. A lot, actually. It seems the same, functionally, but the devil is in the details. When you wanted to post on a forum, you had to hit a button that said "Submit Thread." This is loaded terminology. You are stepping up on the soapbox, your expectation frontloaded on yourself to make a space that others will feel like participating in. There is, in effect, the notion of a certain standard to which you'll be held if you're a thread starter, otherwise it'll flame out and you'll be blamed.
Twitter, meanwhile, sells you the idea that you are "posting to your account." This is at once the idea of a very personal space, like a journal or your own living room. It is also a giant lie- you have walked into a studio which is filming you every time you exist in it, and all anyone has to do is tune in. There's nothing private about this arrangement, and yet, when your space is encroached on- when a stranger posts dissent- it feels like a violation. The instinctive retort is to demand they leave the premises. "Get out of my mentions!" you cry. But they're not in your mentions. They're another actor who has walked onto the set of the shared studio that you don't own and have no real control over. There are no moderators for this forum- the only enforcement is an opaque, faceless process staffed by people you will never see, doing a job nobody should have to do. This force, will almost never step in, even when things get really bad.
I'm not blindly nostalgic here. Forums were often terrible as well- they were a distillation of the most toxic elements of a given interest who would slowly drive everyone else out through increasingly strict rules-lawyering. But. You could very well call them on their bullshit. They were a known element to you. You would say, "Look, Reggie, you do this every week." Really cut to the core, and either they'd accept that or not. But on Twitter there's a new Reggie every five feet. The attraction of Twitter- that everyone is on it- is also its greatest drawback. A forum can offer only so many bad actors who would bother to register for an account, but Twitter is an endless sewer pipe of people who are freshly ready to ruin your day, because that's all they live for. In the land of brevity, the wittiest man is king- but wit is most often at someone else's expense, and thus a system that encourages a biting wit over all else will eventually devolve into a Darwinist nightmare of caustic, disingenuous, Mean Girls style oneupmanship where only the most irony-poisoned and detached may survive.
To make things even worse, somehow, there is an inherent imbalance at play. Social media users want to follow their favorite artists in the same place they can see small clips and memes and jokes and updates from their friends. But as an artist, if you post anything except your art- if you use the platform as it wishes to be used- then you're cluttering up everyone else's dash with things they didn't follow you for. It is a consumer's platform, for which the providers, us, have to carefully curate someone else's feed- which may be simply dumped in the garbage by a completely opaque algorithm the likes of which nobody knows or understands.
Coming back to my original point, I understand now. I get it. I see why and how you would evolve to simply post what you have and leave without engaging- because the biggest platforms of today encourage this, by making it the only way to survive on them. These are not personal failings. They are learned behaviors.
