Don't Talk About It

Save libraries, ditch social media.

Today, I almost tweeted about arugula.

I had some left over, and I fried it in a little olive oil, sprinkled it with salt, and had a delightful, spicy side dish as bitter as my heart. I wondered why I never thought about doing this before. I Googled it (technically DuckDuckGo’d it, because I prefer their non-tracking search engine) and found a recipe by Emeril Lagasse, and immediately, a phantom voice responded to the tweet in my head: wow, you came up with something that Emeril did years ago. What’s next, you gonna be excited about stuff Rachael Ray does all the time?

And I realized that being on Twitter is like having that jerk “friend” who won’t leave the group, even though they hold it in contempt, who has to say something snarky all the time. There might be a lot of great friends in the group, but you’ve got to expend energy ignoring all the jerks. And that’s not even counting the Nazis.

CBS Sunday Morning, which I’ve watched for decades, had a great profile of the Austin Public Library, and why libraries are important. My local library in the Camden County Library system is much smaller, but they try. And I’ll be visiting more often. Austin has laptops, guitars, and seeds you can use in the library or take to plant in your garden, which may seem ridiculous if you think libraries should be about book lending, and not as public community centers. The Baton Rouge city library is one of the nicest I’ve been to, recently. Now, many libraries are under attack for lending books by LGBTQ and Black authors, especially for children, because of Christian nationalists telling their followers that this is “indoctrination” and child abuse. Libraries used to be a point of pride, but now they are under siege. They need our support more than ever. Please look up yours, and plan a visit.

Back to Twitter. Mary Gaitskill wrote about how it makes us winnow our thoughts down to 280 characters, which makes nuance and complicated thoughts difficult to express, but amplifies soundbites and slogans that populists, like the recent one-term President, the first one elected by social media:

“Twitter is the most obvious example of consensual thinking in extremity; a mode in which people who are unable to see or hear each other’s voices and faces type at the world in flattened shorthand that brooks no complexity and which can create a perhaps illusory sense of group cohesion on a massive scale. Great for political drum-beating; a bad habit for almost anything else.”

Political Fiction

Roxane Gay was one of my earliest Twitter follows; I reprinted her story “This is What I Know About Fairy Tales,” in Protectors. She has nearly a million followers, and if anyone knows how to use Twitter, it is her. Here she is dealing with a “critic” who I can’t help but think is a troll who is making a game out of trying to affect her mental health.

Feedback Loops

That’s the seductive lure of Twitter; I have been on Twitter since 2008, and it replaced the camaraderie I found with online friends on blogs, forums, and chat rooms. We want people to be acting in good faith; trolls are a type of abuser who know this and manipulate us, and they’ve been around since before the ‘net. Katie West and Jasmine Elliott edited a great book called Better than IRL, an essay anthology about finding your people the pre-social media internet landscape and what made the internet great during that brief heyday. It’s sadly out of print, but I’ll share my essay for next month’s “story.”

My friend Lauren Hough is more realistic about Twitter than Roxane; maybe it’s her experience as a bouncer, or in a cult, or just sharp thinking and an eye for abusers. She has been talking about the creepy parasocial relationships that Twitter encourages for years, and how woman essayists are assumed to be writing confessionals instead of acting as journalist observers:

Smile.

I reactivated my account last week, after deleting all my Tweets, unfollowing a bunch of accounts, and a decision to only use it for sharing writing news. If you want to know what I think about an issue, you can find out here. I think Twitter can help us get the word out for specific issues, but it’s also impossible to keep up, and terrific engine for misinformation. For example, the police did not flee from the Uvalde shooter when he hopped a fence and walked into the school (they did linger in the hallways, fully armed, for 70 minutes as children screamed and died, mind you). You do you, but I can read the news a few days later on NPR, after things have settled.

More and more, this is all I have to say about social media and what happens there, but it’s also a band introduced to me by my friend Kent Gowran on Twitter.