Member-only story
There’s something distinct about the experience of using Twitter that renders human beings completely unrecognizable when contrasted against their meatspace selves. It’s been already established that social media warps the way we present ourselves online because it optimizes for engagement, but Twitter in particular filters our every thought and emotion in a way that I can only describe as eerily familiar, yet unorthodox all-the-same. The platform is one people join to keep up with their favorite personalities, but left to bask in its weirdness for too long, they’ll become their own generators of self-referential, post-modernist, absurdist humor peppered with a few dashes of sincerity every now and then–if none of what I just said doesn’t make sense, you’ll be relieved to know that neither does Twitter.
It’s impossible to succinctly put into words what it is that happens on Twitter — or at least the parts most-representative of its unique aesthetic — but a good way of conceptualizing it is to think of a diary erstwhile kept private because it was assumed that there was no value in sharing its contents, then upon discovery of the opposite, every errant thought eventually finds its escape…
