Some people didn’t realize how much they “think in Tweets” until they left Twitter. Some people noticed right away. The phrase “think in Tweets” appears very early in the app’s history. Here are a few examples, in no particular order:
- “I was tweeting so much that I was even starting to think in tweets” (https://www.nickykriel.com/blog/category/twitter/page/6/)
- “Everyone who knows me knows I’m obsessed with Twitter. … I’m told I think in tweets.” (https://www.uticaod.com/story/news/columns/2011/07/16/the-visual-side-twitter/45089274007/)
- “Ever think in tweets when ur really frustrated? Happened this morning as dentist was ½ hr late. Thinking angry tweets somehow consoled me.” (https://jennko.tumblr.com/post/515820784/ever-think-in-tweets-when-ur-really-frustrated)
- “I feel like it has overtaken my brain, so that I think in tweets. I’ll see a thing in the world and begin thinking about a tweetable way to say it.” (https://www.theawl.com/2014/05/the-man-behind-techs-most-captivating-tweets/)
- “I started to think in tweets. My husband said it was very sing songy.” (https://www.facebook.com/gabbyblitzrosen/photos/a.102780898411876/102780871745212/)
- “Twitter focused and sharpened my thinking. I started to think in tweets. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing.” (https://visakanv.com/1000/0828-whats-my-substack-for/)
- “I think in tweets now. My hands start twitching if I’m away from my phone for more than 30 seconds.” (https://www.thestranger.com/blogs/2014/12/10/20753599/that-guy-who-took-a-year-off-the-internet-has-some-advice-for-you)
- “I sometimes say that “I think in Tweets”. It’s been the best place to grow a community, learn new things, and just talk to people.” (https://www.elitegamedevelopers.com/start-here-2/)
Is this good or bad?
Compare it with fruit. Fruits were designed by natural selection to entice animals to carry seeds away and deposit them in piles of fertilizer. For humans, eating fruit is also really good for us, not because of the sugar but because of the fiber. So you can think of juice as evolution’s way of getting us to eat fiber. It’s a collaborative evolution between fruiting plants and hungry animals. The positive view of social media is similar. We crave attention (sugar), but we need interaction (fiber). Social media gives us the opportunity to strive for attention, complete with intermittent reinforcement, and when we fall for that we get the social interaction we need. Unfortunately, evolution also set us up to be suckers. We famously undermined the productive collaboration with fruiting plants by first separating juice from pulp, and then just extracting the sugar and injecting it directly into our veins — and calling it progress. So the negative view of social media is more like the calorie story in general: We are programmed by evolution to store fat for times of scarcity, which makes us patsies for the unhealthy food industry. We love attention, so we’ll do stupid things to get it — and even reshape our brains in the process, to make those behavior patterns automatic, built-in elements of our personalities.
Was it just the character limit that built the habit, that forced the brain to conform? I suspect Twitter more successfully altered our brains because we were learning to conform to the character limit while actively wresting with stressful and rewarding interactions within its confines. We were not just forcing our brains to think differently, we were doing so while constantly assessing and retooling our communicative thought processes based on the extremely rapid and emotionally arousing feedback we received. There is a powerful lesson in here about how people effectively learn.
Twitter was good at this, but it wasn’t the only one. The different social media platforms, because of their contrasting technological affordances and patterns of interaction, worm their way into our brains differently. Katherine Dee says, “Our communication media have so permanently shaped our interactions that we think in Tweets, encode our memories in Instagram grids, and process trauma by recording TikToks.” This is more evidence for the idea that the context of emotional reward and punishment, rather than the character limit per se, is what cements the communicate pattern in our brains.
One way to study this was to see how Twitter’s doubling the character limit to 280 in 2017 changed communication patterns: here, here, here. That people’s Tweets changed seems good. But the real good news is brain plasticity apparently persists even in adults, so that when you get off Twitter your brain gradually starts disengaging from that particular character-limit gear. (Perhaps, for those still on the platform, the fascist who runs it lifting the character limit will have the same effect.)
For the writer trying to understand and explain how social media fits into our professional and civic lives, and give some sound advice, this is a conundrum. It’s a frog in boiling water scenario: Something that seems obvious to people who used that platform a lot and perhaps (I wouldn’t know) impossible to imagine for people who didn’t. And it complicates one of the principles I want to suggest as a guide: moderation. Is it possible to use these platforms successfully in moderation — or is it that case where failing to fully immerse yourself, to the point of brain reshaping, means you won’t be good at it?
(Aside: Millions of people “thinking in Tweets” makes it all the more remarkable that Elon Musk choose to throw away a brand identification that strong.)
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Previously Published on familyinequality with Creative Commons License
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