What accounts for the galloping lushness of bad manners on Twitter? A recent incident may shed some light.
When
Bill Clinton appeared on Stephen Colbert's television show in early
April, Colbert expressed surprise that he didn't have a Twitter feed.
Clinton said he didn't tweet because he's "sort of insecure." So Colbert
set up an account ((AT)PrezBillyJeff) and had the former president
dictate his first tweet to him. Clinton added that he was worried he
would attract no followers, saying, "There's nothing worse than a
friendless tweeter, right?" (He needn't have worried: An hour after the
episode was broadcast, he had 20,000 followers.)
My point, If a
household name capable of instantly drawing a crowd is concerned about
looking like a loser on Twitter, think of the burden felt by the average
Joe. In a milieu rife with self-promotion and self-branding, the
inevitable byproduct is insecurity. Insecurity is to bad manners as boat
travel is to nausea.
I joined Twitter in February to give myself a
daily deadline for writing jokes, but soon the demon of success started
breathing fire in my ear. "I don't have enough followers," I soon
started thinking. "I need to twitter-blitz or to set fire to a small
dog." I felt as if I had shown up at the Oscars in a tux by Giorgio
Armandi. The first piece of wisdom I gleaned was unanticipated. Namely,
Twitter fact-checkers are an unforgiving bunch. In March, shortly after
Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio reversed his position on gay marriage because
he has a gay son, I wrote the tweet, "Senator Rob Portman doesn't have
another son who's poor and 87 and in need of health care, does he?"
When
Andy Richter, the actor and writer best known as Conan O'Brien's
sidekick, retweeted the joke to his 452,000 or so followers, one
response I received was a veritable tasting menu of bad Twitter manners,
combining as it did fact-checking (one) with undermining (two) and
blame (three). The response ran, "an 87 year old son? (AT)billmaher made
that same joke, only funny. thanks for nothing (AT)andyrichter."
Trifecta!
The most egregious expressions of insecurity on the
site, of course, are nasty comments. If Twitter is an excellent shopping
mall full of boutiques that offer specialized news and wit and opinion,
it is also a crowded barroom that bristles with a certain kind of white
male rage.
This rage, marked by a hostility toward anything
poetic or naive, reaches its full expression in the comments directed at
Jose Canseco's feed, a highly pleasing outpouring of slightly oddball,
gnomic pronouncements. When Canseco, the baseball player, wrote, "I have
blown up bigger engines than the diesel," one of his followers wrote,
"Jose, I think you're an absolute moron." Canseco's tweet "north korea
do the math" drew
"I'm also very familiar with mental illness."
You
don't have to wield a cudgel to exhibit insecurity, though; I, for one,
turn all my anxiety inward. Every time someone retweets one of my
jokes, it sets off a spate of fretting about reciprocity.
If the
person is a total stranger whose feed I do not follow, then I will look
at this feed and consider climbing aboard. I'll look at the ratio of how
many tweets to how many followers that person has: If it exceeds 10 to
1, then I may suddenly feel shy. Because this person is unknown to me, I
will feel no compunction to retweet a post of hers, though I may be
tempted to "favorite" (the equivalent of Facebook's "like" button) one.
But
what if the person who has retweeted me is someone I know? Suddenly the
pressure mounts. I'll proceed to follow her, of course, if I don't
already. Then I'll start feeling very guilty if I don't retweet one of
her posts.
Occasionally the disquiet caused by scanning an
acquaintance's home page for a reciprocal retweet can escalate. Richter
said: "Sometimes I just cannot pull the trigger. Then I'll bump into
that person in the real world and they'll compliment me for my tweet.
That's like saying, 'I saw your jail video on the Web!"'
Further
complicating these bouts of anxiety about reciprocity is that they tend
to happen in clumps. Like other activities rooted in the nonessential
(finally reading that back issue of The Economist, say, or trimming
difficult-to-reach hairs on your person), Twitter is at its most
compelling when you are trapped in an airport hotel in Tulsa, Okla.
You'll write 10 tweets that night, two or three of which will catch
fire, drawing traffic. This traffic will want managing. You'll wake up
the next morning and discover you've got some thank-you letters to
write.
Such a situation befell me recently when a joke about a
family member ("Although it's entirely untrue, my mother likes to tell
people that I'm a film critic for NPR because that gets the biggest
reaction") was retweeted by two colleagues in journalism. A more
political one ("America: we may not be able to provide affordable health
care for all, but our podcast industry is untouchable") was retweeted
by the writer Merrill Markoe and "favorited" by the comedian Rob
Delaney.
I wondered how to acknowledge this praise. I summarily
retweeted tweets from both of my colleagues' feeds. (I ruled out hitting
the Reply button and writing "Thanks!" because publicly disseminated
thank-you letters are, for their nonrecipients, the most boring reading
on the planet.)
But Markoe, being a comedy influence of mine, and
Delaney, having some 820,000 followers to my 1,100, needed much more. I
will admit that my desire to pinpoint these two people from among the
others who retweeted or "favorited" the same joke attests to a kind of
snobbism pervasive on Twitter, and of which I'm party to: Because
they're well-known, these two are names that I want to spray onto the
faces of my followers like an alley cat with a jet of civet. So I
composed what is the most obsequious tweet I've yet written: "Oh, if I
forgot to tell you that Merrill Markoe retweeted me and Rob Delaney
favorited me yesterday, it's because I am already dead." Mr. Lick, meet
Mr. Spittle.
I grant you, my Twitter anxieties are to a large
degree those of a newbie. I'm told that the more you tweet and the more
followers you have, the less you stress over whether you've returned the
favor (but the more trolls you're likely to encounter). In an ideal
world, I would have enough followers that my retweeting of a nonfamous
person's witticism would have the kind of impact that my celebrated
colleagues' retweeting of my work has had on me.
"It's sort of
noblesse oblige to alert people to the unfollowed," said Richter, who is
admirable for often retweeting people far less famous than him. "Sure,
it feels a little royal doing it, but there are people who deserve it."
John
Moe, who hosts the public radio show "Wits," was one person who did it
for me. I'd like to tell you how good this made me feel, but first I
need to remove my shoulders from my earlobes. In the meantime, I will
simply long for a more innocent time, a time when constant
self-promotion was less complicated and anxiety-producing. As I posted
recently: "I love Twitter. But Facebook will always be my Wasilla."
