I Just Deleted 36000 Tweets

And it felt great.

A brief history of me and Twitter.

I joined it in January, 2007. It was and still is (to a degree) a great way to cultivate a microcosm based community of people and things I like talking to, engaging with and hearing from. I’ve made friends on Twitter, been in the news from it, been close to the founders. A lot of people I know have gone through the halls of Twitter from the original office to now.

I tweeted almost 37,000 times over the time span. I made it an ecosystem that I consumed like a forced drink of water. The glass would fill when I wasn’t paying attention, and I’d drink the whole thing before moving on to the current state of affairs.

There was the fear of missing something, some news, new technology or quip. Something I could give input on, or research, or save to Pocket and never come back to again.

I gave Twitter a lot, it gave me something in return. Then it started taking, and taking, and taking. It never got smarter, or more empathetic to the needs of its user base. It became not an enjoyable pursuit but a duty, then an obligation. Then a forced ride in a flaming subway car.

So I got off. I deleted the app from my phone and my desktop and stopped reading every tweet.

The result: I didn’t miss it. The news still came in, but this time at the end of a day and through some of other means off aggregation. I missed some DM’s (sorry!) and some people that don’t use Facebook or Instagram as much, but the rawness of the feed turned out to be noise.

Assembling reality from the fragments of nuance is as foolish as making a snowman by catching flakes in mid-air.

Wait until it all settles, then figure out what you have.

Last week I had coffee with Hunter Walk who said he deleted his Twitter data and now auto-deletes Tweets regularly, so it becomes a transient outlet instead of permanent. As an experiment I downloaded my entire archive and randomly started poking through it. Without context, without the situation at hand, I wanted to punch the avatar of myself that came across in tweets from the past.

Outrage, commentary, snippy rebuttals, etc. Remnants of opinions past, jobs past, products past and situations that I can’t even remember. There wasn’t anything rooting my 140 character maximum missives within a larger context. They were just these fragments of nothing without any situational awareness in and of themselves.

So I deleted them. All of them, and set the service I used to do this to delete all my tweets past the latest 20.

Now I’m tepidly back on Twitter, but I found the joy it once provided, the sense of community it engendered with people far and wide through the world has gone. I used to have it as a sounding board, but now I have this blog, Facebook and Instagram. I found that the sipping on the feed beats outright consumption, but without full consumption, there is no context. It’s a subway train in the night that sometimes I just don’t want to get on, so I don’t. It’s not always on fire, but more often than not is, so the window gets closed and I find something else to do.

Without repartee, permanence or context, its become something I’ll check, sometimes shout into and leave.

A lot has been debated in regards to the future of Twitter, and this experiment in self-exile, immolation and Phoenixing on my part gave me a perspective. Before my criticism was for the product itself: it’s just not very good. The app isn’t great, the website even worse.

But now I think it something more fundamental: the Party Line problem.

Early telephone exchanges were loops rather than point to point, unless you paid for private point to point direct lines. The limitations of the infrastructure combined with the economics of the community led to the creation of a new medium and culture, with its own standards and practices. As well as consequences, such as gossip, lack of privacy, etc.

The last party line was shut down in 1990 in the US. The need for them expired, technology had caught up, society had moved on and the cultural norms they caused had retired to nostalgia.

Twitter emerged as SMS was taking hold as a means of communication, as IM was approaching apex, and as blogging was moving toward mainstream. It combined the best of all: ephemerality, transience with permanence and the beauty of communal self aggregation. It was IRC for a world nostalgic for the compartmentalization of communal identity. All the culture around it provided layers of stratification and self identification to the free form nature: hash tags, @replies, direct messaging, Tweet Storms. It was refreshing to see something so open be so emergent.

But people have moved on, and the culture that has emerged and was invented by those wanting to connect has been turned inside out as a means of creating division. The democratization and de-centered nature of the network has stratified into a centralized bully pulpit. Just as gossip, invasion of privacy and technological/economic progress lead to the death of the party line, Twitter has become not an avatar for the utopian ideals of technological progress, but instead the embodiment of the commodities and realities that progress left in its wake.

It’s facile to call it a dumpster fire. It’s likewise too simplistic to blame this all on the political climate. In the end our perception of the world are layers of meaning wrapping around our personal subjectivity. When one of those layers loses any coherency, its time to excise its influence from our ontological reality.

Or to put it more simply: life is difficult enough, why compound it by consuming everyone else’s problems on top of your own?

So where does that leave me? I’m back on Twitter in a new way, I read it ocassionally but not obsessively and I’ll participate in the same manner. I missed its amplification properties, but I found that like anything, you make of it what you want, ignore what you don’t.