Whither, Twittiquette?
I got into an argument with a gentleman last night over twitter. I had posted a tweet about his application (which I hashtagged) in which I questioned certain aspects of that application. Inevitably, sometime later, he responded. A few back-and-forths later, he tried to dismiss me as a troll. Now I’ve been around the internets long enough to know the cold, slime-slick claw of a troll when I see it and this wasn’t it. Besides, how can I be trolling in my own feed?
Let me say this first: I don’t begrudge a man who wants to defend his own creation. I most certainly would do the same. I appreciate that twitter is a medium through which he could address me both personally and in the larger context of anyone else interested in him or his product. That being said, what I found distressing was his attempt to paint me as some sort of skulk by suggesting that if I post, in my own feed, something negative about his creation, I’m somehow interloping into his inviolate demesne.
This brings me about to wonder, like everyone else is, about the future of this micro-blogging medium. While the legion of twitter pundits ponder how celebrities and the mainstream will change twitter, I find myself asking whether twitter will not, in fact, eat itself.
The average internet messageboard is, perhaps, the very worst place to have a conversation. Every disagreement is distended into a holy war of the most extreme (but thankfully) virtual nature. The creed of these specialized warriors, to quote Conan, is “to crush their enemies, see them driven before them, and to hear the lamentation of their women.” It is no place for civilized discourse.
Trolling, of course, stands at the epicenter of this warrior vocabulary. Determining, in any given message thread, who is or who is not a troll is often the most important object of the battle, very often overshadowing exactly what the battle was about anyway. It is often the first and last salvo fired by zealots on either side of any argument, real or imagined: You’re a troll! No way, you’re the troll! Stop trolling! You stop trolling! Et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum.
While the never-ending battles on message-boards lend them a Viking-like Valhalla allure (where the brave may live… forever!), for actual communications, conversations, they are often worse than useless. My fear is that this warrior mentality, honed to the razor-sharp efficiency of a shark’s tooth, is going to be, by degrees, let loose onto the twitterverse. Maybe it already has, I don’t know, but I hadn’t seen its bite before now.
Was it an aberration or a first shot that signifies a sea change in the way discussions and consequently disagreements are handled in twitter? I don’t know. Perhaps it’s inevitable that much as twitter has, of late, molded the internet, so the internet, in its turn, will mold twitter- and what model more appropriate than the messageboard? After all, isn’t twitter really just the extreme evolution of the messageboard itself? A global conglomerate messageboard?
It’s plain that twitter cannot stay the way it is. What it will become is harder to see. Maybe it’ll be the celebs, the mainstreamers that kill it or save it or twist it inside out. Or maybe that’s not it at all, maybe the big fear is really more primal, more basic than that, maybe all the pundits are looking in the wrong place. I have looked into twitter and I have seen that there, swimming in its heart, there be monsters. And those monsters is us. Same as it ever was. How long could it be before they are set free or let loose?
