Twitter has a way of taking people who start out as distinct individuals and converging them into the same personality... The example I use is Trump, Kanye and Elon. Ten years ago they had distinct personalities. But they've converged to have a remarkable similarity of personality, and I think that's the personality you get if you spend too much time on Twitter.
From Ran Prieur’s 085.
That's a great observation, but I wonder why that is the case? The thing about Twitter is that it is a bubble, which can actually be a great thing if you surround yourself with people that embody values you resonate with. Most people however seem to get stuck in the 2 main attractors of social media: 1) chasing followers and likes and 2) the performative game of hating things or people just for the sake of hating, or because that also gets you likes, more so than being honest and constructive.
But it doesn't have to be that way. So coming back to the original question, why do big accounts seem to converge towards being the same type of person?
The first thing I'd say is that the big accounts are not representative of most people, for the obvious fact that they're big. Their interaction with Twitter is pretty much a single player game, because there is no way you have time to interact with anyone else in a meaningful way, and if you do it's someone you know, and so you might as well do it in private messages at this point. This means that we shouldn't only look at the biggest accounts to determine the effects of social media, because not everyone is interested in the quest for big numbers. Maybe the vast majority of people are swayed by that, and thus it is worth taking into account, but it is also worth holding the fact that you can literally decide to use the internet in a different way from most people, and surround yourself with better influences.
The dynamic of having social media devolve into a single player game means that it is essentially an echo chamber of their own thoughts, except that it has to fit within a narrow window of what is okay to share about at the risk of receiving massive backlash. This isn't necessarily about the political Overton window, though of course that is very real, but then again Trump and Kanye West are already known for being controversial, so it can't only be that. 1 It also has to do with for instance sharing things the lowest common denominator would like, such as funny remarks instead of insightful thoughts, or commenting about the thing everyone else talks about. In essence, you either talk about utterly inconsequential things, or you oversimplify everything to be understood by the average Joe and get liked by your in-group.
This means that the constraint of not being cancelled is one thing, but on the other side there is also the entire game of maximizing the amount of likes. I don't know to what extent those people consciously or unconsciously, play that game, but you can imagine that it reinforces a certain dynamic. For instance: people recognize you for saying certain things, which is inevitably an incredibly reductive version of who you are because everything is filtered through a 280 character tweet, and then you start to be known for certain bits. The type of tweets that match that bit get liked far more than the other ones, such that there is an audience capture that leads people who optimize for likes to become bits themselves. Repeating the same gimmicks over and over, because they're trapped in a prison of what is recognizable, which is literally Flanderization but for social media. The essence of that dynamic being that subtlety fades over time once you start optimizing for popularity, because the mass collective's sense of discernment is essentially non existent. 2
So perhaps that is the key reason why mass media is so problematic: because the large scale collectives that surround us are totally unconscious, and increasingly so. An individual can make conscious decisions, and direct their attention, and learn from their past, but the largest, and thus most powerful ones aren't able to do so. So what gets spread around is just the type of stuff that people are bad at not sharing, not the stuff they actually want to share. People talk about Will Smith slapping that other guy because they don't really know how to not do that, they don't slow down enough to think about what actually matters in life. It might be a sad situation, but ultimately I don't have control over social media, only about my attention and how I use it. And I don't care about that type of clown show.
1 If I really cared about understanding the examples given in the quote, Trump, Kanye West and Elon Musk, I would have spent some time reading their tweets, but I'm going to be perfectly honest, I don't want to spend my time doing that. It also strikes me as unhealthy for the mind to read what those people have to say quite frankly.
Go back to the list of blog posts
2024-08-25