Capital “O” Online

I deleted Twitter - hesitantly - on a Friday. I did it because I needed a break. I needed to scroll less and instead focus more. I was curious to see what would happen if I stopped putting a 280 character limit on my thoughts. Would I think bigger things? Find more time for writing? Rise above the rough and tumble of the daily internet and start finding themes in my existence?

It was a lot to attribute to a platform, perhaps, but the importance Twitter has played in the past six years of my life made the experiment seem worth it.

I started my Twitter account - reluctantly - in the spring semester of my senior year of college. I dreamed of becoming a journalist and I understood that, as a journalist, I should tweet. I remember that I found a list of Top People to Follow published by Foreign Policy magazine and took my cues from that. The resulting timeline was incredibly depressing - all human rights abuses and political grandstanding. Needless to say, I didn’t spend a lot of time there.

From a professional perspective, though, Twitter turned out to be quite consequential. As an intern on the editorial pages at USA Today I got my first taste of “doing” social media. And at least somewhat on the strength of this I landed my next internship, on the Social Media Desk at NPR. It was there that the platform became a daily habit. I grew my following list to include journalists and parody accounts and, at the urging of my then-boss, a bunch of cute animal content. My timeline improved and I dove in, in early 2015, to understanding this platform with the ferocity of a guilty late adopter. There was so much to learn, so many conventions to adopt, so many memes to understand.

My unusually pop-culture-free childhood had prepared me well for this kind of cultural cramming (I’d already done it with music and TV and movies, after all), and I was determined to prove that I could be capital “O” Online.

And then… I was.

I invariably knew the latest memes and kept my finger in the pulse of breaking news and exchanged tweets with writers I so admire. It was exhilarating. And there were other good things about it. I developed what I tend to think of as my “twitter personality” - louder, brasher and funnier than I am IRL but still, of course, a part of me. The observations I made about the world were “liked” and “retweeted.” I went minority viral a couple of times. People would come up to me, in person (!), and say “oh, I love your Twitter.” It was addicting.

But I started noticing bad things, too. When the platform was overtaken by a particularly dark news cycle - school shootings and #MeToo spring immediately to mind - I’d find myself disabled by it all. I’d scroll and scroll, reading newest take after newest take, deeply unhappy but unsure how to get away. The tab never stayed closed long enough - there was always the excuse that I needed to be online for my job. I felt a sense of responsibility, maybe, to bear witness to the bad as equally as the good and it took a toll.

So when I quit my reporting job at the end of February and could no longer cling to the “needing to be online” excuse, I logged off. I’d been planning a hiatus for a while, but as the global coronavirus pandemic intensified it seemed like a particularly good time for me.

So how’d it go?

My month-long cleanse didn’t produce the next great American novel or any profound thoughts about the nature of existence. Nor was it characterized (as I had expected and/or feared) by the constant urge to tweet.

Instead it was just... nice. It felt like a good vacation. And it gave me the time to think about what I actually value about the platform, dark days aside.

So I’m back. I still need to figure out how to moderate my own intake, I think. I’ll be working on that.

In the meantime… send memes.