Social media - use as wanted or use as compelled?
In which it's worth thinking about how we use Twitter, Facebook, IG etc. and how they use us
In October 2022 I’ll be celebrating (?) 15 years of using Twitter. I wasn’t an early adopter but I rode in on one of the earlier waves in 2007. Some days I wonder about how different my life would be today without it: which parts would be better, which parts would be worse, and how much of it would be completely unaffected. I have also used other services like Facebook and Instagram but for several reasons I rarely use those applications now, I just don’t get the value there.
Today in the Canadian newsletter The Line, columnist and long time Twitter user James McLeod wrote Can a politician really leave Twitter?, sharing a story about Siri Agrell, a media savvy Canadian political candidate running for Toronto’s city council, who has decided to not use social media in the context of political campaigning and as an active politician.
McLeod then examines his own use of Twitter in particular, citing a recent experiment on limiting his usage and shifting from real time to scheduled responses, leading to the following reflection:
I thought that this experiment would be like going on a social media diet — the same experience, just a bit less satisfying. Instead, almost immediately it felt like I was fighting against an enormous machine.
Of course, I know design steers behaviour, but I hadn’t fully appreciated how much the design of a social media platform encourages certain kinds of behaviour. Most users don’t really feel the full force of it, because they just slide effortlessly into that mode of interaction.
This is why it’s basically impossible to get into a political argument on Instagram (and you’d feel foolish if you tried) and basically impossible to avoid getting into a political argument on Twitter. These are carefully designed spaces, with product managers constantly monitoring user metrics and fine-tuning the platform to maximize attention, engagement, consistent daily use, and other such performance indicators.
The culture of a platform — Twitter quips, Tiktok dances, conspiracy videos on YouTube — it’s all just a byproduct of those design decisions optimizing for user metrics.
But taken together, what it means is that if you try to use a social media service like Twitter or YouTube in some way that’s not “normal,” you’re running contrary to the design of the environment and you’re out of step with all the other users.
McLeod also discusses his personal feelings and experiences about using the platform:
… I still live most of my life through my internet connection, and I’ve found a rich world of experiences and human connections online. In spite of all the problems, there’s a lot to love about online. But I think we should all be thinking more about digital devices as tools that we use intentionally, in ways that we choose. We should resist the easy pull of going with the flow, and just modeling patterns of warped and weird behaviour just because it’s the culture of a particular website.
There’s a few things to unpack here and I’m going to add my thoughts.
First of all, McLeod uses Twitter very much in a combined personal and professional approach, definitely a journalist with a wry sense of humour. As a person working in media he’s frequently watching and engaging with peers, colleagues and randos to an extent that most of us don’t need to. Not only that, with 20K plus followers, even if you subtract 50% of his followers as being bots, cranks and inactive accounts1 he’s still potentially being seen by more people than double the population of my home town and interacting with many.2
So I believe he’s strongly compelled to view and interact regularly, partially by application design and partially because he must enjoy it on some level. I would argue that the Twitter application design probably favours frequent users like McLeod and not so much the user who drifts in and out looking for light, distracting fare.
I can appreciate how changing your preferred mode of interaction can feel uncomfortable. I’d argue that it’s McLeod’s own habits and reasons for using the platform as much as the application design that made a change of routine difficult.
But in terms of use case, I wholeheartedly agree that Twitter does make a tempting battleground to air beefs and rage against other users. Yes, the brevity is one of the key culprits: it takes a lot of work to bring nuance to your posts when you have 280 characters to make your case, whereas other platforms like Facebook and Instagram give you plenty of real estate to work with (though I’d argue that there’s something about Facebook that makes it a perfect battlefield for long, unhinged, ungrammatical rants - it could be a case of providing too much real estate to people who we tend to know in person and who can have a much more direct impact on our personal lives.) 3 But a short rant, using emotionally charged language, very often draws an equally passionate response as though other people have been waiting in the bushes, ready to charge when they see the signal.
And, let’s be honest, Twitter’s main timeline is bewildering to a lot of people, a complex interaction of automated Tweets, people musing to themselves and people actually communicating with each other in a fractured version of real time. But those of us who stick with the service either like or tolerate how it works. Or maybe it’s just the people. Could be both.
If we stay, we adapt to how Twitter works. Like any learned behaviour, change will naturally feel awkward at first and there are always reasons to revert to a status quo.
Like McLeod, I get a lot out of using Twitter, mainly through being exposed to other viewpoints and new information that tends to surface faster on Twitter than other media. I do get a lot of chuckles out of the day’s posts. I feel sad when I see something tragic (although the sadness becomes more muted as the crappy events in the world just seems to keep increasing). I am pleased and proud when I see my fellow users support each other constructively. And so on.
But is Twitter a replacement for more intimate, real life interaction? Is it a place where a politician or public figure should have a presence? I can think of examples in the Maritime provinces where a politician’s presence and engagement on Twitter does them no favours, I’ll put it that way. I’m actually hard pressed to find politicians who use the services well, but I’ll give a nod to New Brunswick’s Green MLAs who generally do a good job. Is it the platform, the other users or the politicians themselves who cause this? Probably all three but you’ve got to assign responsibility to the user.
Siri Agrell has made her own informed choice and good for her. Will she be able to stick to it by using other methods to reach voters? We’ll see, as McLeod muses.
As for whether or not Twitter inevitably leads to fighting and negative feelings, that’s not my experience but I actively cultivate a different approach and I’m not above filtering the experience to remove noise/aggravation. But we should always remember that we’re constantly creating an electronic breadcrumb trail that people use to create a limited but memorable impression of us, whether we are public or private citizens. So remember that the next time you’re compelled to act, remember that you have a choice in what you do next.
Someone should have warned Elon Musk about this, apparently - I figure Twitter’s official 5% count is off by a factor of 10 for bigger accounts but I could be wrong.
I think there are 10 active Twitter users in my home town, pop. 5500, but that’s another story. And I’m at least 5 of them.
I’ve probably only met 5% of my Twitter network in person, compared to 75%+ on Facebook, where I rarely go now.