Bye Bye Birdie: Why I Stopped Tweeting and Started Blogging
Eighteen months ago, I deactivated my Twitter account after nearly a decade on the platform. Last spring, I started this blog. In the past few weeks, I have found myself explaining why I took these steps to people who found one or both of them counter-intuitive. For those (no doubt few) of you who might be missing me on Twitter, and for readers here at The Art of Association, it occurred to me I should share my journey with you.
I started using Twitter in 2010 for a few different and I expect pretty typical reasons. It seemed like a semi-interesting and harmless thing to do. I was starting to write for public audiences about my work, and I wanted to see what others (people I knew personally and some I didn't) were saying about the issues I was working on. There was no doubt some fear of missing out. I wanted to add my thoughts to the stream of tweeted musings others were throwing into the mix on topics and events grand and mundane. That was how it started anyway.
Before long—perhaps it was the point where I picked up my 100th (!) follower—I came to regard and describe my Twitter account with innocent self-importance as "a platform." I now had an audience and wanted to expand it. I spent more time on the app. I paid more attention to likes and retweets and to honing tweets that would generate them. I wanted to get to 200, then 500, then 1,000, then 2,000 followers. The race was on!
However, a few years ago, perhaps not coincidentally around the 2016 presidential campaign, I began to notice I was having some difficulty concentrating. I became restless reading prose longer than a tweet thread or a few bullets. I struggled to get to the end of 800-word op-eds. Long-form articles and books felt even more daunting. I sensed my short but frequent scrolls through Twitter throughout the day had something to do with it. I was hunting for information I could absorb in ever-smaller bites. And while I could bang out glib tweets all day long, as I became more scatterbrained, drafting even a few reasoned paragraphs for a short memo felt like a heavy lift.
About the same time, I came to realize that, rather than exposing me to different and diverse perspectives – one of my rationales for being on Twitter – the platform put political blinders on me. Not so much on the left-right political spectrum, where I could diagnose and correct for imbalances. Instead, the blind spots lay in the gap between the issues that the highly ideological and politically activated people in my Twitter feed argued about, primarily from coastal enclaves, and matters of interest and concern to everyone else, i.e., the vast majority of Americans living across the fruited plain. I was not surprised when, in 2019, the Pew Research Center found that 10% of Twitter users (approximately 2% of the U.S. population) generated 80% of the tweets on the site.
I also found myself getting more and more riled up, even angry, as I doom-scrolled through my Twitter feed and got pulled into debates on issues I hadn't spent much time thinking about with random interlocutors I didn't know. It was like I was a glutton for dyspepsia.
My descent accelerated, as many things did, during Donald Trump's presidency. I was not a fan. I could not believe he was President of the United States, and the leader of the political party Ronald Reagan had inspired me to join as I came of age – the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower. But there I was every morning, right where Trump wanted me to be: on Twitter, reading and being outraged by the latest unpresidential rant he had tweeted from his bathroom in the wee hours of the previous night.
By 2018, I grasped I had crawled down a hole and needed to climb out. I took steps recommended by researchers and refugees from the tech industry who knew how social media platforms hacked our attention spans to keep us on their sites, constantly scanning for the next dopamine hit. I turned off my notifications. I stopped following President Trump and other people who irritated me. I made and kept a vow not to be snarky or mean-spirited in what I tweeted. I tracked and limited my use of Twitter to 30 minutes a day. I deleted the app from my phone, so I would not be tempted by it there.
These steps helped a bit. But I knew I was managing an addiction, not overcoming it. Then I read technologist Jaron Lanier's book, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. It gave me a deeper understanding of how and why I had gotten hooked on Twitter – and why my attempts to manage its negative impact would be futile. I couldn't refute his arguments.
I had a breakthrough in the fall of 2019. It came in conversation with a wise leader who had just launched a new program at a Washington think tank that sought to clarify first principles and undertake more profound diagnoses of social problems to better tackle the challenges facing the country. In the course of our conversation, I asked whether he and his team planned to use social media as part of their work. He chuckled and said that, unfortunately, he did not expect they could solve the kind of problems he considered to be worthy of their attention by tweeting about them.
His observation about which problems warranted our attention and how best to address them stayed with me. A week later, as an experiment, I deactivated my Twitter account over Thanksgiving. My nerves were jangly for the first day or two, but I grew more relaxed as the weekend progressed. I had a busy December coming up at work, so I thought I'd keep the account deactivated for a bit longer and see if that helped my productivity. It did. Life went on, and we had a relaxing Christmas vacation as a family.
After the holidays, I thought about reactivating my account for the new year. 2020 would be a highly consequential election, and I needed to stay abreast of the campaign. Then I realized it was too late. More than four weeks had passed since I deactivated my account, at which point Twitter had deleted it. At first, I thought, "oh no!" Then I thought again and said to myself, "good riddance!"
I realize I may be coming across as a prig. I don't doubt some people can use Twitter and other social media platforms without having them become disordered attachments in their lives. I have a LinkedIn account I use once or twice a month without feeling compelled by it. But for me, Twitter was and is Kryptonite. I also appreciate that, for many people, their professional responsibilities require them to be on Twitter, and their sizable followings, orders of magnitude larger than mine at its peak, could alter the cost-benefit calculations of being on the platform. But if I am being honest with myself, I am not one of these people.
I still follow the news daily, just in old-fashioned ways. I now get the Wall Street Journal delivered to my home and read the newspaper with my coffee each morning. My wife and I watch the PBS NewsHour at the end of the day with a glass of wine and pistachios. My new media diet has me consuming news reported, edited, and curated by journalists. It is more edifying than the all-you-can-eat buffet of hot takes I had overindulged in on Twitter. It also has kept me better informed about what is happening in the economy and society outside politics.
About this time last year, as I continued my Twitter detox, I realized I had ideas and observations I wanted to share and get feedback on from others in an informal setting. But the problems I wanted to pay attention to needed thinking through in more depth and detail than Twitter allowed. Hence my decision to start this blog. It has come to serve as the intellectual equivalent of a Couch to 5K training program for me.
I like the opportunity to engage less frequently but more deeply with the few hundred people who subscribe to and read the blog (thank you, by the way!) rather than the few thousand who might have once scrolled past my tweets in their feed. The conversations and email exchanges with readers prompted by different posts invariably generate new insights and connections. Paradoxically, my old-school blog feels much more social to me than social media ever did.
Another goal for the blog was to push me to make sense of complex issues lying at the intersection of civil society and democracy as best I could, then track whether I was right. In an early post, I quoted George Orwell's observation that when it came to such matters, "to see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." Orwell's recommendation for those attempting the struggle was to "keep a diary, or… some kind of record of one's opinions about important events" to test one's viewpoints "against solid reality." I started blogging in part to hold myself accountable in this way.
How is it going? I recently looked back on my posts over the past year to see. I feel good about many of the perspectives I have shared. With others, the jury is still out. Ironically, my two biggest whiffs came in the very post in which I invoked Orwell's warning and guidance. I underestimated the extent to which the COVID-19 pandemic would feed into and exacerbate our political tribalism. I also was mistaken in suggesting the protests of armed militia groups of the sort then surfacing in my home state of Michigan amounted more to political theater than substantive threats to civil order (a conclusion that definitely does not fare well in hindsight!). Duly humbled, I have reflected on why I was wrong on these counts and corrected my working assumptions accordingly. You blog, and you learn.
Indeed, looking back over the past year, the pleasant surprise is how much I have learned about the issues, leaders, and organizations I have blogged about here. It is bracing to write for people you know and whose judgment you respect. It pushes you to understand and do justice to the full depth and complexity of issues, reckon with alternative viewpoints, and reach measured conclusions. I may have started this blog in transmit mode, but I persist in receiving mode, learning and reflecting about what others are seeing and doing to make the world a better place. That especially feels like a worthwhile change from my time on Twitter.
