Quite superb from Kathleen (again!) A non-twitterer myself, but fully recognise the smorgasbord of humanity she lays before us. I do use other social media sites, specific to my interests, and what she describes plays out on pretty much all of them. In effect, Twitter is probably just the most universal version of the greatest mirror held up to humanity in our history.
Someone once suggested to me that a PhD candidate will have more casual readers (maybe 30?} peruse their 280-character musings on twitter than serious people will have interest in reading that candidate’s dissertation. The very dissertation that projects the candidate’s full sense of self-worth when concluding decades in school.
It is a heavy day when a PhD candidate realizes this truth so far into their academic career and, indeed, their very lives. Cynicism and sarcasm is the inevitable result as the candidate rants on twitter, “I’m smart and have something important to say, dammit, and people need to listen to me!”
Yes, the academic system is broken as it churns out more PhDs than the world has need of. Most dissertations outside of STEM should barely (if at all) qualify that person for a master’s degree if we’re really being honest with ourselves about the quality of the output.
In short, degree and professional certification inflation coupled with coddling contributes to the narcissism found on twitter.
Very true (I’m also a non-twitterati , but still I fear it’s going into the tank), and Kathleen is surfacing here (unherd) as a reliable lure to read articles with her name on them. Her following description is as straightforward as it is painfully accurate:
“ For many users, informational exchange is only the incidental pretext to more important things like self-aggrandisement, covert attacks on imagined enemies, and consolidation of social power.”
Alas the temptation of this is difficult to resist – hence the possibility of self-knowledge and improvement (speaking for myself here- not casting aspersions at any other commenters).
Bottom line – no one is gunning for you personally ((except as it was in Ms. Stock’s case, and likely those with big followings who were eliminated by the erstwhile folks in charge) – no one will ask to be your buddy or put you in harm’s way.
It can be the Wild West, the State of Nature or analogous things, but being there won’t change your life, although you can use the experience to resist the temptation of self-aggrandizement and and the grandiose self.
Social media is a soap-box for impassioned idiots. Twitter deals in certainties. For that reason alone, it should be avoided.
Thinking does not require too much intelligence. Thinking is a skill, like wood-carving; it can be learned. Humility, patience, honesty, a sense of humour; all those are far more important aids to the craft of thinking than masses of grey matter. No brain, however large, can smuggle thoughts past the wall of a brittle ego.
The basis of thinking is an ability to embrace inner conflict. If you wish seriously to think about anything, you have to dismantle your own comfortable ideas, and argue against yourself. Nobody goes on Twitter, or on to any social media, to rubbish their own ideas.
Twitter does not lend itself to nuance, or to doubt.
That’s the basis of an adversarial legal system; both sides in a case slug it out and try to make dirt of each other’s position. And, obviously, swap the lawyers, and they will easily tomorrow argue against their own position yesterday.
That seeming cynicism and amorality leads to lawyers being culturally derided as unprincipled by the hoi polloi.
The same hoi polloi who would convict you by accusation, on social media, if they could.
However, it also points up how principle itself is an impediment to thinking. And Twitter itself has a surfeit of quivering principles.
If you’re truly thinking, there can be no sacred cows.
If the principle is a good one, it will survive being beaten up.
But this ability to hold opposing ideas in suspense, and to attack your own position, is beyond many people nowadays. It’s certainly beyond a platform like Twitter. It’s not that people have suddenly became more stupid since e.g. the 1970s, but we do now live in a culture of cookie-cutter secular commandments. It is the age of bug-eyed, derivate, sloganeering certainties. Everyone “believes!”; everyone falls in line with their group; everyone derives their personal identity from their group mantra; everybody has a slogan; nobody thinks any more.
The problem is that everyone thinks they already are thinking.
How to spot non-thinkers:
(i) Slogans – anyone repeating fashionable, or group-think, slogans. The vapid / bitchy bromides you find on Twitter. Not a thought in their heads. As Orwell noted:
“… modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning – they dislike onething and want to express solidarity with another – but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you – even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent – and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.”
(ii) Conviction – anyone who is certain and who never wavers. Probably should be sectioned.
Interestingly, (iii) fluency itself is the enemy of thinking. In this short interview near the end of his life, Heidegger notes how a “new care” must be “brought to language”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qouZC17_Vsg
He’s right. That carefulness and rigour often is weakened by eloquence. Long pauses, honesty, cul de sacs, untidiness, a sense of incompleteness, and constant self-doubt, are the cornerstones of thinking. I used to enjoy debates in college, but some of it was a form of culturally-sanctioned middle-class aggression which in part depended on punning wordplay. You could pour eloquence, like Derridian sauce, over the gaps in your argument, but you were often spoofing, to win the game. It often had very little to do with true thinking. Boris Johnson did this all the time, and he knows well what he’s up to. Behind the carefully-curated buffoonery, “the Yeti” (his college nickname) is a clever guy, possibly one of the smartest blokes in British politics. Social media generally is like this – it exalts and rewards shallowness and ad hominem attacks. If you really want to have interesting debates, join a debating society or enrol in a philosophy degree.
And as Camus said, nothing is true which forces you to exclude.
One wonders what Heidegger would make of a culture that flees, outraged, from the patience and the doubt of thinking, as if in triumph.
Steve I love this. So true… “Twitter is probably just the most universal version of the greatest mirror held up to humanity in our history”.
I don’t use Twitter, FB or any of them. This sort of thing is as far as I go, and not too much of this. It’s just a waste of life. Do we seriously think we’re going to change anyone’s mind? And do we care if we do or not?
That, as Stock says, leaves self-aggrandisement and virtue signalling, which don’t really matter to me. I don’t care what anyone thinks about me here – as they don’t know me.
I recognise many of the traits outlined here from my own time posting on ToL. Once I realised that some of my posts were deliberately designed specifically to provoke others whom I considered “opponents” rather than for anything truly constructive or informative, I stopped. After all, I was wasting my time on people that I was interpreting through text and who might be quite different from that perception in real life, with no real possibility of actually changing anyones mind about anything! I have to admit, it took me quite some time to come to that conclusion and I reckon that backsliding at election time is a distinct possibility……
Jeff Butcher
1 year ago
I stopped using Twitter when I realised that rather than being a diverse smorgasbord of opinion it was actually really just a shop window for writers like Stock and so called ‘opinion formers’ – basically an extension of the publishing industry. It’s full of people flogging their latest thing in a crowded market place under the guise of ‘community’. You’re just another punter, and there’s a sucker born every day folks! It also a phenomenal waste of time.
John Roseveare
1 year ago
This summer I sat on a beach reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch. (For the first time: I’m 62 years old). Despite Kathleen Stock’s thought provoking essay, I’m not convinced my time would have been better spent on Twitter. Eliot’s characters are given the opportunity to fully explain themselves in their own terms. As readers, we then find ourselves reflecting on our own emotional responses to the various fictional trials and tribulations afoot. Like sensitive souls being grandiose. My feeling is it would take a very long time onTwitter to achieve the same thing: Twitter seems to get stuck in the crawling weeds of shrill, lazy, mind-already-made-up rhetoric.
There is no doubt in my mind that your time was, and anybody else’s would be, better spent reading a book, especially Middlemarch, than going on twitter.
Last edited 1 year ago by Claire D
Prashant Kotak
1 year ago
Unconvinced. Doesn’t come close to persuading me to join twitter. To paraphrase Abe, twitter is large scale idiocy, of the people, for the people and by the people.
It’s a cesspool. There may be worse places, such as 4chan, but the veneer of respectability and influence that Twitter holds make it somewhere I’d rather steer clear of. With 4chan there are no pretensions.
Yes, all those civil servants get in the way of cabinet autocracy nearly as much as Parliament does. No more checks and balances on half-wit think tank spawn like Truss, that’s the way forward lol
J Bryant
1 year ago
An interesting take by the author on the usefulness of Twitter. One of the great blessings of my life is that I’ve never been tempted to use social media (unless the comments section of Unherd counts as social media).
As an aside, am I the only one seeing an advert for “The Owo Residences” on this and other Unherd articles? I’ve seen this ad for the past two days. I’m a paid subscriber and I thought one of the perks of paying for access is you don’t get hit with advertising.
Alongside others, i’ve made attempts to prevent Unherd becoming Twitter-like by commenting as such on posts which take the type of knee-jerking (and other-jerking) approach. Thus far, if we can be regarded as a ‘community’, i think we’ve been successful (alongside the moderation by Unherd, perhaps) in preventing any wormholes from opening into the void.
Even on Unherd comments it’s quite easy to fall into a reactionary wormhole sometimes. But, as Stock says, one should realise it’s not personal but a very very strange way of interacting. We used to have local pubs which worked much better at this.
I like your analogy of the Pub. Sadly they are few and far between in England these days, but seem to going strong in the Irish Republic, despite the appalling lockdown they had to endure.
As did the fact, which you ignore, that younger generations, long before covid, were drinking less and going off boring pubs anyway. Pubs are never as fun as their biggest fans imagine them to be – they cater for a certain type of blokey extrovert with a drink problem and an unsatisfactory home life. And thats fine, but for heaven’s sake stop holding such places up to be special, they’re not.
Probably because in pubs you saw, heard, smelled, and touched (well maybe not touch) those you were conversing with. Real People. What we have now are Minds In Cyberspace.
Alexis Richardson
1 year ago
Twitter is best understood as an online game. You win by scoring more points – followers – than other players. You add followers by making moves in the game – tweets, replies, likes, retweets. The bigger your engagement the more other players you reach. These other players can amplify your play and/or add to your followers.
Like other such games it is a multiplayer world or if you like, a simulation. As such each player account takes on its own persona in the game. Your followers are based on your persona – so to keep scoring high you must maintain the same role play even if it is a fiction. This is what leads to the toxicity of Twitter as a social medium.
I am not sure how Musk’s plan to verify users will affect this. If Twitter stops being a game where fake and real persons interact, it may become a lot less fun. Although maybe also less toxic? Turning it into a content and commerce platform may be a great thing in the long run. But people who then want a game will find it elsewhere.
Sorta like in Monopoly the game is to accumulate all the pretend money? In Twitter the game is to accumulate Likes and Followers?
AC Harper
1 year ago
These, then, are just a few of the condensed life lessons available to you when you log on.
And eventually when that particular social medium or website becomes the preserve of unpleasant and spiteful people the lesson becomes even more straightforward – log off.
Some websites (etc.) start off well and display thoughtful comments, then they become captured by a particular world view and move, eventually, to denigrating those who display ‘ wrong think’. Include me out of these mob sites.
Yeah I recall my first experiences of discussion forums on the internet (was it as far back as the nineties – I’m not sure) when I ventured into sites about politics and discovered the delights of being ‘flamed’ if you disagreed with the mob. Unherd comments expressing disagreement are quite tame compared to those days.
Bob Bobbington
1 year ago
Really enjoyed that. Thanks, Kathleen.
John Snowball
1 year ago
I have never had a Twitter account. When I first came to know of it several years ago, it looked for all the world like a forum for people who are far too fond of their own opinions.
Stephen Fry has flounced off? Says it all really.
John Snowball
1 year ago
I have never had a Twitter account. When I first came to know of it several years ago, it looked for all the world like a forum for people who are far too fond of their own opinions.
Stephen Fry has flounced off? Says it all really.
Elaine Giedrys-Leeper
1 year ago
I don’t recognise any of these descriptions of Twitter.
The bit of Twitter I use consists of a group of thoughtful, measured science types who give concise and for me, useful critiques of papers / data. The critiques don’t always agree. This is fun and educational to read. These interactions are generally focused, polite and free of polemic.
Some of these people do have agendas or possibly a better description would be “special interests”. These are obvious to any reader.
For me it is a quick method of getting relatively clean information.
Sure – you use it like the early internet. I also bet you and your group of “thoughtful, measured science types” use their real names too. This is the way it should be used. I also bet you don’t have thousands of followers (I suspect you don’t care) or get flamed a lot for expressing your views.. However, I would have thought you would recognise the majority don’t use it that way.
If you don’t recognise any of these descriptions then I think you must lead a very sheltered life.
I also use Twitter like the early internet – message boards, friendly interaction, brilliant source of information, humour, consolation. Preferred the 140-character limit though. Perhaps you find the Twitter you go looking for? Everywhere in life there are people who flame and snark and everywhere in life most people ignore the bits that aren’t obvious cries for help.
I don’t know. What do “the majority” do ? How would I find out what “the majority” do ? Does Twitter publish details of the demographics / interests / activity of its users ? Is this data viewable in the public domain ? Aren’t some / many of these accounts bots ?
No, I don’t post on Twitter unless I am praising someone or something or on one occasion, complaining about crap service.
Like any other social setting, people find and gravitate towards the tribes they feel most comfortable with / have the most interest in. If the chosen tribe proves to be non simpatico you can always choose to leave.
If you choose to post an unsupported opinion on anything in a public domain you must expect to be challenged and sometimes this will be couched in less than polite terms as anonymity encourages people to take liberties.
Does travelling the world with a back pack and significant other by train and bus for 3/4 of each year count as being unsheltered ?
OK, “sheltered” might not be the best word to use – I was not implying you were a nun, merely that you appeared to me sheltered from the ideas being expressed. “Bubble” might be a better word.
“Does Twitter publish details of the demographics / interests / activity” – spot the scientist. No I don’t have this. However, I am acquainted with quite a large number of people of a wide range of political views, age groups etc, the media.and those who use Twitter would recognise these descriptions.
I agree this is subjective. The majority of Twitter users may even use it in a similar way that you do but the “loudest” certainly do not and given the many thousands/millions of “followers” they have I suspect they don’t.
I agree this is subjective. The majority of Twitter users may even use it in a similar way that you do but the “loudest” certainly do not and given the many thousands/millions of “followers” they have I suspect they don’t.
I realise this add nothing to the discussion, but one of the reasons I subscribe here is the fact that I thought we were all using our real names. But I see pseudonyms creeping in here too… *sigh*
Nikki Hayes
1 year ago
Twitter is undoubtedly a cesspool – but its one I occasionally enjoy diving into for an argument or two. Usually about politics or culture wars- participation requires a thick skin as you WILL be insulted horribly at some stage and possibly threatened. I have a strict policy – name calling results in an immediate block, ignoramuses like that are not worthy of my debating time. Like all socia media, Twitter is what you make it – plenty of people on there never get involved in the scrum of political debate and no doubt avoid the aforementioned insults and threats. I don’t spend a lot of time on there – I allow myself no more than 30 minutes and even that is not every day. I am following what Musk does with interest – and munching popcorn whilst watching lefties throwing their toys out of the pram.
Nikki Hayes
1 year ago
Twitter is undoubtedly a cesspool – but its one I occasionally enjoy diving into for an argument or two. Usually about politics or culture wars- participation requires a thick skin as you WILL be insulted horribly at some stage and possibly threatened. I have a strict policy – name calling results in an immediate block, ignoramuses like that are not worthy of my debating time. Like all socia media, Twitter is what you make it – plenty of people on there never get involved in the scrum of political debate and no doubt avoid the aforementioned insults and threats. I don’t spend a lot of time on there – I allow myself no more than 30 minutes and even that is not every day. I am following what Musk does with interest – and munching popcorn whilst watching lefties throwing their toys out of the pram.
Michael Askew
1 year ago
“The world would be a better place without Twitter” – discuss
The real danger of Twitter is when people with power believe it represents the views of the people. I firmly believe it is responsible for the impact of so many minority organisations on daily life, taking the establishment in an opposite direction to that of the people. It will end in tears.
Guy Aston
1 year ago
The real danger of Twitter is when people with power believe it represents the views of the people. I firmly believe it is responsible for the impact of so many minority organisations on daily life, taking the establishment in an opposite direction to that of the people. It will end in tears.
Rod McLaughlin
1 year ago
Thank you. If I ever reach 98K followers without going through a fraction of the abuse directed at Sapphist sophist @Docstockk, I’ll think I’ve done good.
Nicholas Taylor
1 year ago
I confess that in my brief and infrequent forays into Twitter I have not detected any atmosphere, only vacuum. I have enough to do without scrolling through the random thoughts and blurts of others like those people I see with their phones on the bus, or have to avoid being walked into by in the street. I feel we are drowning in this stuff. Yet it makes me constantly anxious, in case hidden in the garbage is some piece of vital information, as during the Arab Spring that the ‘security’ police are just around the corner with live ammunition. Yet this too is just a twitt into the vacuum, an expression of my own helplessness and fatigue with the constant eruption of instant celebrities and conflicting ‘facts’, and I fear so is Professor Stock’s excellent article. A mirror to humanity one commentor says. Would leaving a number of loaded guns among the toys in a room full of toddlers mirror humanity? I think ‘social media’ mirror something more basic. Now I’m going out to get some air.
Nicholas Taylor
1 year ago
I confess that in my brief and infrequent forays into Twitter I have not detected any atmosphere, only vacuum. I have enough to do without scrolling through the random thoughts and blurts of others like those people I see with their phones on the bus, or have to avoid being walked into by in the street. I feel we are drowning in this stuff. Yet it makes me constantly anxious, in case hidden in the garbage is some piece of vital information, as during the Arab Spring that the ‘security’ police are just around the corner with live ammunition. Yet this too is just a twitt into the vacuum, an expression of my own helplessness and fatigue with the constant eruption of instant celebrities and conflicting ‘facts’, and I fear so is Professor Stock’s excellent article. A mirror to humanity one commentor says. Would leaving a number of loaded guns among the toys in a room full of toddlers mirror humanity? I think ‘social media’ mirror something more basic. Now I’m going out to get some air.
Nicky Samengo-Turner
1 year ago
not being on twitter must surely be as exclusive as a hereditary peerage?
Bob Hardy
1 year ago
For those who would like to examine digital spaces (‘bubbles’ and ‘spheres’ are excellent metaphors here BTW) in more rigorous detail, they might like to tackle Peter Sloterdijk’s various writings on the subject.. And the subject (medium :-)) of ‘virtual reality’? .. Well the ‘go-to’ there would be Baudrillard of course.. From the perspective of these two cultural critics, what fascinates me is for just how long the predictions of the various …. ‘symptoms’ … of present social media that we are currently suffering from have been so accurately described ..And the fact that Mr Fry (an entertainer that I have a very soft spot for BTW) has left twitter? .. Will this have the same earth-shattering effect on ‘the world as we know it’ as Neil Young and Joni Mitchell’s exit from Spotify’ some time ago (you do all know about this particular global event of course), I wonder?
Rod McLaughlin
1 year ago
Thank you, Sapphist Sophist
Rod McLaughlin
1 year ago
Thank you, Sapphist Sophist
Neil Anthony
1 year ago
Anonymity is the recipe to recite the weakness on meanness. On the other hand, the blue check may be the primitive forerunner to human telepathy. Oh well who knows where this rabbit hole will lead humankind… guess we’ll just have to leave it up to Alice and the twits.
Neil Anthony
1 year ago
Anonymity is the recipe to recite the weakness on meanness. On the other hand, the blue check may be the primitive forerunner to human telepathy. Oh well who knows where this rabbit hole will lead humankind… guess we’ll just have to leave it up to Alice and the twits.
Quite superb from Kathleen (again!) A non-twitterer myself, but fully recognise the smorgasbord of humanity she lays before us. I do use other social media sites, specific to my interests, and what she describes plays out on pretty much all of them. In effect, Twitter is probably just the most universal version of the greatest mirror held up to humanity in our history.
Can’t remember who said it but:
‘To become an empirical thinker you must first cease to be the hero of your own narrative’.
Not an injunction followed by anyone on Twitter so far as I can tell.
Hmm, this probably goes a long way in explaining why I’m struggling with my doctoral research at the moment.
No one striving for a doctorate should have any audience whatsoever. You have made a series of bad life decisions, but it might not be too late.
Someone once suggested to me that a PhD candidate will have more casual readers (maybe 30?} peruse their 280-character musings on twitter than serious people will have interest in reading that candidate’s dissertation. The very dissertation that projects the candidate’s full sense of self-worth when concluding decades in school.
It is a heavy day when a PhD candidate realizes this truth so far into their academic career and, indeed, their very lives. Cynicism and sarcasm is the inevitable result as the candidate rants on twitter, “I’m smart and have something important to say, dammit, and people need to listen to me!”
Yes, the academic system is broken as it churns out more PhDs than the world has need of. Most dissertations outside of STEM should barely (if at all) qualify that person for a master’s degree if we’re really being honest with ourselves about the quality of the output.
In short, degree and professional certification inflation coupled with coddling contributes to the narcissism found on twitter.
Likewise, an excellent essay.
As another non-twitterer, I am simply astonished by its popularity, but now, at last, I know why!
Very true (I’m also a non-twitterati , but still I fear it’s going into the tank), and Kathleen is surfacing here (unherd) as a reliable lure to read articles with her name on them. Her following description is as straightforward as it is painfully accurate:
“ For many users, informational exchange is only the incidental pretext to more important things like self-aggrandisement, covert attacks on imagined enemies, and consolidation of social power.”
Alas the temptation of this is difficult to resist – hence the possibility of self-knowledge and improvement (speaking for myself here- not casting aspersions at any other commenters).
Bottom line – no one is gunning for you personally ((except as it was in Ms. Stock’s case, and likely those with big followings who were eliminated by the erstwhile folks in charge) – no one will ask to be your buddy or put you in harm’s way.
It can be the Wild West, the State of Nature or analogous things, but being there won’t change your life, although you can use the experience to resist the temptation of self-aggrandizement and and the grandiose self.
Social media is a soap-box for impassioned idiots. Twitter deals in certainties. For that reason alone, it should be avoided.
Thinking does not require too much intelligence. Thinking is a skill, like wood-carving; it can be learned. Humility, patience, honesty, a sense of humour; all those are far more important aids to the craft of thinking than masses of grey matter. No brain, however large, can smuggle thoughts past the wall of a brittle ego.
The basis of thinking is an ability to embrace inner conflict. If you wish seriously to think about anything, you have to dismantle your own comfortable ideas, and argue against yourself. Nobody goes on Twitter, or on to any social media, to rubbish their own ideas.
Twitter does not lend itself to nuance, or to doubt.
That’s the basis of an adversarial legal system; both sides in a case slug it out and try to make dirt of each other’s position. And, obviously, swap the lawyers, and they will easily tomorrow argue against their own position yesterday.
That seeming cynicism and amorality leads to lawyers being culturally derided as unprincipled by the hoi polloi.
The same hoi polloi who would convict you by accusation, on social media, if they could.
However, it also points up how principle itself is an impediment to thinking. And Twitter itself has a surfeit of quivering principles.
If you’re truly thinking, there can be no sacred cows.
If the principle is a good one, it will survive being beaten up.
But this ability to hold opposing ideas in suspense, and to attack your own position, is beyond many people nowadays. It’s certainly beyond a platform like Twitter. It’s not that people have suddenly became more stupid since e.g. the 1970s, but we do now live in a culture of cookie-cutter secular commandments. It is the age of bug-eyed, derivate, sloganeering certainties. Everyone “believes!”; everyone falls in line with their group; everyone derives their personal identity from their group mantra; everybody has a slogan; nobody thinks any more.
The problem is that everyone thinks they already are thinking.
How to spot non-thinkers:
(i) Slogans – anyone repeating fashionable, or group-think, slogans. The vapid / bitchy bromides you find on Twitter. Not a thought in their heads. As Orwell noted:
“… modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.
People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning – they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another – but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you – even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent – and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.”
(ii) Conviction – anyone who is certain and who never wavers. Probably should be sectioned.
Interestingly, (iii) fluency itself is the enemy of thinking. In this short interview near the end of his life, Heidegger notes how a “new care” must be “brought to language”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qouZC17_Vsg
He’s right. That carefulness and rigour often is weakened by eloquence. Long pauses, honesty, cul de sacs, untidiness, a sense of incompleteness, and constant self-doubt, are the cornerstones of thinking. I used to enjoy debates in college, but some of it was a form of culturally-sanctioned middle-class aggression which in part depended on punning wordplay. You could pour eloquence, like Derridian sauce, over the gaps in your argument, but you were often spoofing, to win the game. It often had very little to do with true thinking. Boris Johnson did this all the time, and he knows well what he’s up to. Behind the carefully-curated buffoonery, “the Yeti” (his college nickname) is a clever guy, possibly one of the smartest blokes in British politics. Social media generally is like this – it exalts and rewards shallowness and ad hominem attacks. If you really want to have interesting debates, join a debating society or enrol in a philosophy degree.
And as Camus said, nothing is true which forces you to exclude.
One wonders what Heidegger would make of a culture that flees, outraged, from the patience and the doubt of thinking, as if in triumph.
As an epistemologist, it is refreshing to read such an informed comment.
Only just read your post, which is excellent, thank you.
Steve I love this. So true… “Twitter is probably just the most universal version of the greatest mirror held up to humanity in our history”.
I don’t use Twitter, FB or any of them. This sort of thing is as far as I go, and not too much of this. It’s just a waste of life. Do we seriously think we’re going to change anyone’s mind? And do we care if we do or not?
That, as Stock says, leaves self-aggrandisement and virtue signalling, which don’t really matter to me. I don’t care what anyone thinks about me here – as they don’t know me.
I recognise many of the traits outlined here from my own time posting on ToL. Once I realised that some of my posts were deliberately designed specifically to provoke others whom I considered “opponents” rather than for anything truly constructive or informative, I stopped. After all, I was wasting my time on people that I was interpreting through text and who might be quite different from that perception in real life, with no real possibility of actually changing anyones mind about anything! I have to admit, it took me quite some time to come to that conclusion and I reckon that backsliding at election time is a distinct possibility……
I stopped using Twitter when I realised that rather than being a diverse smorgasbord of opinion it was actually really just a shop window for writers like Stock and so called ‘opinion formers’ – basically an extension of the publishing industry. It’s full of people flogging their latest thing in a crowded market place under the guise of ‘community’. You’re just another punter, and there’s a sucker born every day folks! It also a phenomenal waste of time.
This summer I sat on a beach reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch. (For the first time: I’m 62 years old). Despite Kathleen Stock’s thought provoking essay, I’m not convinced my time would have been better spent on Twitter. Eliot’s characters are given the opportunity to fully explain themselves in their own terms. As readers, we then find ourselves reflecting on our own emotional responses to the various fictional trials and tribulations afoot. Like sensitive souls being grandiose. My feeling is it would take a very long time onTwitter to achieve the same thing: Twitter seems to get stuck in the crawling weeds of shrill, lazy, mind-already-made-up rhetoric.
There is no doubt in my mind that your time was, and anybody else’s would be, better spent reading a book, especially Middlemarch, than going on twitter.
Unconvinced. Doesn’t come close to persuading me to join twitter. To paraphrase Abe, twitter is large scale idiocy, of the people, for the people and by the people.
It’s a cesspool. There may be worse places, such as 4chan, but the veneer of respectability and influence that Twitter holds make it somewhere I’d rather steer clear of. With 4chan there are no pretensions.
Agreed. A sewer under new management is still a sewer
Perhaps Mr Musk would consider ‘culling’ 50% of the UK Civil Service, after he has finished with Twitter?
Yes, all those civil servants get in the way of cabinet autocracy nearly as much as Parliament does. No more checks and balances on half-wit think tank spawn like Truss, that’s the way forward lol
An interesting take by the author on the usefulness of Twitter. One of the great blessings of my life is that I’ve never been tempted to use social media (unless the comments section of Unherd counts as social media).
As an aside, am I the only one seeing an advert for “The Owo Residences” on this and other Unherd articles? I’ve seen this ad for the past two days. I’m a paid subscriber and I thought one of the perks of paying for access is you don’t get hit with advertising.
Alongside others, i’ve made attempts to prevent Unherd becoming Twitter-like by commenting as such on posts which take the type of knee-jerking (and other-jerking) approach. Thus far, if we can be regarded as a ‘community’, i think we’ve been successful (alongside the moderation by Unherd, perhaps) in preventing any wormholes from opening into the void.
Long may it continue.
Even on Unherd comments it’s quite easy to fall into a reactionary wormhole sometimes. But, as Stock says, one should realise it’s not personal but a very very strange way of interacting. We used to have local pubs which worked much better at this.
I like your analogy of the Pub. Sadly they are few and far between in England these days, but seem to going strong in the Irish Republic, despite the appalling lockdown they had to endure.
Well, yes we still have a few. But the Covid lockdowns did put a dent in pub culture here (I suppose they put a dent in just about everything really)
You suppose correctly.
As did the fact, which you ignore, that younger generations, long before covid, were drinking less and going off boring pubs anyway. Pubs are never as fun as their biggest fans imagine them to be – they cater for a certain type of blokey extrovert with a drink problem and an unsatisfactory home life. And thats fine, but for heaven’s sake stop holding such places up to be special, they’re not.
Probably because in pubs you saw, heard, smelled, and touched (well maybe not touch) those you were conversing with. Real People. What we have now are Minds In Cyberspace.
Twitter is best understood as an online game. You win by scoring more points – followers – than other players. You add followers by making moves in the game – tweets, replies, likes, retweets. The bigger your engagement the more other players you reach. These other players can amplify your play and/or add to your followers.
Like other such games it is a multiplayer world or if you like, a simulation. As such each player account takes on its own persona in the game. Your followers are based on your persona – so to keep scoring high you must maintain the same role play even if it is a fiction. This is what leads to the toxicity of Twitter as a social medium.
I am not sure how Musk’s plan to verify users will affect this. If Twitter stops being a game where fake and real persons interact, it may become a lot less fun. Although maybe also less toxic? Turning it into a content and commerce platform may be a great thing in the long run. But people who then want a game will find it elsewhere.
Sorta like in Monopoly the game is to accumulate all the pretend money? In Twitter the game is to accumulate Likes and Followers?
And eventually when that particular social medium or website becomes the preserve of unpleasant and spiteful people the lesson becomes even more straightforward – log off.
Some websites (etc.) start off well and display thoughtful comments, then they become captured by a particular world view and move, eventually, to denigrating those who display ‘ wrong think’. Include me out of these mob sites.
Yeah I recall my first experiences of discussion forums on the internet (was it as far back as the nineties – I’m not sure) when I ventured into sites about politics and discovered the delights of being ‘flamed’ if you disagreed with the mob. Unherd comments expressing disagreement are quite tame compared to those days.
Really enjoyed that. Thanks, Kathleen.
I have never had a Twitter account. When I first came to know of it several years ago, it looked for all the world like a forum for people who are far too fond of their own opinions.
Stephen Fry has flounced off? Says it all really.
I have never had a Twitter account. When I first came to know of it several years ago, it looked for all the world like a forum for people who are far too fond of their own opinions.
Stephen Fry has flounced off? Says it all really.
I don’t recognise any of these descriptions of Twitter.
The bit of Twitter I use consists of a group of thoughtful, measured science types who give concise and for me, useful critiques of papers / data. The critiques don’t always agree. This is fun and educational to read. These interactions are generally focused, polite and free of polemic.
Some of these people do have agendas or possibly a better description would be “special interests”. These are obvious to any reader.
For me it is a quick method of getting relatively clean information.
Sure – you use it like the early internet. I also bet you and your group of “thoughtful, measured science types” use their real names too. This is the way it should be used. I also bet you don’t have thousands of followers (I suspect you don’t care) or get flamed a lot for expressing your views.. However, I would have thought you would recognise the majority don’t use it that way.
If you don’t recognise any of these descriptions then I think you must lead a very sheltered life.
Three cheers for sheltered lives!!
I also use Twitter like the early internet – message boards, friendly interaction, brilliant source of information, humour, consolation. Preferred the 140-character limit though. Perhaps you find the Twitter you go looking for? Everywhere in life there are people who flame and snark and everywhere in life most people ignore the bits that aren’t obvious cries for help.
I don’t know. What do “the majority” do ? How would I find out what “the majority” do ? Does Twitter publish details of the demographics / interests / activity of its users ? Is this data viewable in the public domain ? Aren’t some / many of these accounts bots ?
No, I don’t post on Twitter unless I am praising someone or something or on one occasion, complaining about crap service.
Like any other social setting, people find and gravitate towards the tribes they feel most comfortable with / have the most interest in. If the chosen tribe proves to be non simpatico you can always choose to leave.
If you choose to post an unsupported opinion on anything in a public domain you must expect to be challenged and sometimes this will be couched in less than polite terms as anonymity encourages people to take liberties.
Does travelling the world with a back pack and significant other by train and bus for 3/4 of each year count as being unsheltered ?
Posting an unsupported opinion ?
How do you determine if an opinion
HAS support or not ?
So much of received wisdom
is simply false.
OK, “sheltered” might not be the best word to use – I was not implying you were a nun, merely that you appeared to me sheltered from the ideas being expressed. “Bubble” might be a better word.
“Does Twitter publish details of the demographics / interests / activity” – spot the scientist. No I don’t have this. However, I am acquainted with quite a large number of people of a wide range of political views, age groups etc, the media.and those who use Twitter would recognise these descriptions.
I agree this is subjective. The majority of Twitter users may even use it in a similar way that you do but the “loudest” certainly do not and given the many thousands/millions of “followers” they have I suspect they don’t.
I agree this is subjective. The majority of Twitter users may even use it in a similar way that you do but the “loudest” certainly do not and given the many thousands/millions of “followers” they have I suspect they don’t.
I realise this add nothing to the discussion, but one of the reasons I subscribe here is the fact that I thought we were all using our real names. But I see pseudonyms creeping in here too… *sigh*
Twitter is undoubtedly a cesspool – but its one I occasionally enjoy diving into for an argument or two. Usually about politics or culture wars- participation requires a thick skin as you WILL be insulted horribly at some stage and possibly threatened. I have a strict policy – name calling results in an immediate block, ignoramuses like that are not worthy of my debating time. Like all socia media, Twitter is what you make it – plenty of people on there never get involved in the scrum of political debate and no doubt avoid the aforementioned insults and threats. I don’t spend a lot of time on there – I allow myself no more than 30 minutes and even that is not every day. I am following what Musk does with interest – and munching popcorn whilst watching lefties throwing their toys out of the pram.
Twitter is undoubtedly a cesspool – but its one I occasionally enjoy diving into for an argument or two. Usually about politics or culture wars- participation requires a thick skin as you WILL be insulted horribly at some stage and possibly threatened. I have a strict policy – name calling results in an immediate block, ignoramuses like that are not worthy of my debating time. Like all socia media, Twitter is what you make it – plenty of people on there never get involved in the scrum of political debate and no doubt avoid the aforementioned insults and threats. I don’t spend a lot of time on there – I allow myself no more than 30 minutes and even that is not every day. I am following what Musk does with interest – and munching popcorn whilst watching lefties throwing their toys out of the pram.
“The world would be a better place without Twitter” – discuss
Perhaps a question for the All Souls exam?
The real danger of Twitter is when people with power believe it represents the views of the people. I firmly believe it is responsible for the impact of so many minority organisations on daily life, taking the establishment in an opposite direction to that of the people. It will end in tears.
The real danger of Twitter is when people with power believe it represents the views of the people. I firmly believe it is responsible for the impact of so many minority organisations on daily life, taking the establishment in an opposite direction to that of the people. It will end in tears.
Thank you. If I ever reach 98K followers without going through a fraction of the abuse directed at Sapphist sophist @Docstockk, I’ll think I’ve done good.
I confess that in my brief and infrequent forays into Twitter I have not detected any atmosphere, only vacuum. I have enough to do without scrolling through the random thoughts and blurts of others like those people I see with their phones on the bus, or have to avoid being walked into by in the street. I feel we are drowning in this stuff. Yet it makes me constantly anxious, in case hidden in the garbage is some piece of vital information, as during the Arab Spring that the ‘security’ police are just around the corner with live ammunition. Yet this too is just a twitt into the vacuum, an expression of my own helplessness and fatigue with the constant eruption of instant celebrities and conflicting ‘facts’, and I fear so is Professor Stock’s excellent article. A mirror to humanity one commentor says. Would leaving a number of loaded guns among the toys in a room full of toddlers mirror humanity? I think ‘social media’ mirror something more basic. Now I’m going out to get some air.
I confess that in my brief and infrequent forays into Twitter I have not detected any atmosphere, only vacuum. I have enough to do without scrolling through the random thoughts and blurts of others like those people I see with their phones on the bus, or have to avoid being walked into by in the street. I feel we are drowning in this stuff. Yet it makes me constantly anxious, in case hidden in the garbage is some piece of vital information, as during the Arab Spring that the ‘security’ police are just around the corner with live ammunition. Yet this too is just a twitt into the vacuum, an expression of my own helplessness and fatigue with the constant eruption of instant celebrities and conflicting ‘facts’, and I fear so is Professor Stock’s excellent article. A mirror to humanity one commentor says. Would leaving a number of loaded guns among the toys in a room full of toddlers mirror humanity? I think ‘social media’ mirror something more basic. Now I’m going out to get some air.
not being on twitter must surely be as exclusive as a hereditary peerage?
For those who would like to examine digital spaces (‘bubbles’ and ‘spheres’ are excellent metaphors here BTW) in more rigorous detail, they might like to tackle Peter Sloterdijk’s various writings on the subject.. And the subject (medium :-)) of ‘virtual reality’? .. Well the ‘go-to’ there would be Baudrillard of course.. From the perspective of these two cultural critics, what fascinates me is for just how long the predictions of the various …. ‘symptoms’ … of present social media that we are currently suffering from have been so accurately described ..And the fact that Mr Fry (an entertainer that I have a very soft spot for BTW) has left twitter? .. Will this have the same earth-shattering effect on ‘the world as we know it’ as Neil Young and Joni Mitchell’s exit from Spotify’ some time ago (you do all know about this particular global event of course), I wonder?
Thank you, Sapphist Sophist
Thank you, Sapphist Sophist
Anonymity is the recipe to recite the weakness on meanness. On the other hand, the blue check may be the primitive forerunner to human telepathy. Oh well who knows where this rabbit hole will lead humankind… guess we’ll just have to leave it up to Alice and the twits.
Anonymity is the recipe to recite the weakness on meanness. On the other hand, the blue check may be the primitive forerunner to human telepathy. Oh well who knows where this rabbit hole will lead humankind… guess we’ll just have to leave it up to Alice and the twits.