I’ve been spending some time on Twitter lately. Why in God’s name would I be doing that you may ask yourself? Well, a long time ago in a Galaxy far far away, called the 90’s, I used to really enjoy AOL chatrooms and, while I know that there are other chat rooms out there somewhere, Twitter seems to me to come closest to having a similar, real time, interactive experience with total strangers, with a nearly unlimited number of strangers to choose from with all kinds of intriguing niche interests. (Facebook does the same for me with people I already know.) The problem with Twitter is that, it’s really hard to start these conversations because so many have no expressed or hard to find context. Communication is really hard in the best of circumstances. It’s even harder online without the added information from tone of voice, body language, etc. It’s hardest on twitter where our minds fill in the blanks of context and are very likely to be wrong.
While this lack of context seems obvious, and you’d think that it would be taken into account in moderating one’s reaction to things that other people say, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to start a conversation and been attacked. My usual tactic is to comment on something that the person I’m trying to talk to has said. Always gently, always expressing interest in what they’ve said and trying to get more information, sometimes offering something that I would add or suggesting that my experience disagrees with something, with an acknowledgement that my experience could be limited and am curious about learning more. Most of these attacks focus on my age or the fact that I’m a white male. It seems that there is no room for baby boomers or white males in conversations anymore, at least on Twitter (these sorts of attacks have not happened to me on other social media). The biggest accusation is of mansplaining, which has never been my intention. I’ve never thought that I understood anything better than a woman unless it was something about being a man. I have often found women to think they understand completely various male points of views, emotions, thoughts and even points of physiology and in fact, were completely wrong. I feel certain that the same is true of men that think that they understand women. I’m not sure what to think about trans or gender fluid people when it comes to this sort of (mis) understanding.
This isn’t the thing that really concerns me though. I suspect it may just be a generation gap thing. Not having kids, I’ve never really experienced a generation gap so, for all I know, this is what it always looks like, just, in small boxes on the internet. What really concerns me is the number of Tweets I see that state something along the lines of “If you disagree with me don’t bother to Tweet to me” or “The way I feel about this is correct and if you disagree go ‘f’ yourself.” Not, “think” about but “feel” about. When did our emotions about something become the arbiter of “truth?” I can see our emotional reaction to things being “valid”. I can see them being “important”. I can see them being worthy of consideration, but Truth? I’m being generous when I say “disagree with”. Sometimes these posts forbid whole classes of people from speaking with them.
What concerns me is the hostility and the desire to be closed off to everyone who doesn’t agree with them, even over the most mundane of things. Trying to keep the lack of context in mind, and being able to imagine any number of events that could cause that sort of reaction, I’ve looked at any other messages attached to these posts to see if I could find a context or the person’s profile if I couldn’t. Most of the time there is just no context. So, giving the benefit of the doubt, I will assume that there are reasons for those posts, that they are emotional reactions to something rather than a real-life philosophy. However, that begs the question, do you really want to appear the way that such messages make you look? In most of these instances the people in question have a body of posts that suggest this is not the norm, but there are a few where this seems like the only sort of thing, they ever post and I wonder what the point is. If you really are hostile to communication, why are you on social media, posting publicly at all? We live in a strange world and I think It’s only going to get stranger.
