I've been on Twitter for a couple of months now, and to say it's been an enlightening experience would be one way to put it. Another way to put it would be that I, along with Twitter's other 330 million or so users, have been exposed to a yawning great hellmouth of confusion and internet culture that I just can't seem to look away from.
Still, entering said hellmouth has provided numerous learning opportunities for me, some of which I was more thankful for than others. So that you too can acquire this knowledge without having to suffer as I have, and in honour of Twitter's recent (controversial) layout change, I have compiled a list of seven of the most important things I've learned here:
When drama or discourse is about to break on the internet, it will surface on Twitter first. There are a lot of criticisms you can make of Twitter, but the website's claim that "it's what's happening" is generally pretty accurate. It only took a little while of me being on Twitter to realise that conversations might have been happening on there for several days (an eternity in internet time) before they reach the likes of Facebook or other social media websites. As a result:
If you don't understand something you've seen on Twitter, there's no guarantee that Google will be able to help you. I'm sure most of us have been through this experience before: you see something online, it doesn't make sense to you, you Google it, and (often with the help of Urban Dictionary or a Buzzfeed article) you eventually learn what it's all about. This process doesn't work with Twitter. I spent a day or so utterly confused by everyone's mention of "cliff wife" on my feed before the story broke in other areas of the internet, at which point I finally learned what everyone was talking about. Before that, Googling or even searching within Twitter was no help at all.
The memes, by and large, just aren't as good. Don't get me wrong: there are some good memes on Twitter. Nevertheless, the hard truth is that they're generally just not as good as the ones on Facebook. Maybe I'm following the wrong people, or maybe FB's algorithm is just better suited to showing its users the crème of the meme crop, but that's what I've found. There is also another problem with the memes/jokes on Twitter, and that is:
For every funny tweet you see, there is a 50% chance it was stolen. I'm not going to get deep into the issues with internet culture and the commodification of memes and how with the prevalence of screenshotting much of what you see on social media is "stolen" in some sense anyway, but I will say this: at least on Facebook, a screenshotted meme (or tweet or tumblr post) at least normally retains the creator's username and is obviously not being claimed as original. On Twitter, where people regularly copy-paste other people's tweets and then send them from their own account as though they were the creator of the joke all along, this is not the case. Thankfully, you can normally rely on Twitter's dedicated userbase to expose the fraud in the tweet's replies, normally with screenshots and (another) meme about stealing jokes.
Academics love Twitter. This is actually one of the main reasons why I first joined the site, after I was at a conference and realised the majority of the people there were either live-tweeting the talks, introducing themselves to people they'd previously only known via their Twitter accounts, or just discussing the apparently self-contained sphere of "academic Twitter". To be honest, I don't know exactly why academics love Twitter so much. Perhaps it's the focus on text-based posts rather than images or videos, something which appeals to people who work in a field based largely upon reading and writing. Maybe it's the way the website's format lends itself to discussion and debate. Or, possibly, people who work in an increasingly fragile industry are keen to use any opportunity for networking and self-promotion. Either way, academic Twitter is definitely one of the brighter spots of the website and one of the few aspects of it that I don't regret introducing myself to. That said, even if academics love it, it is still true that:
Everybody hates Twitter, including and especially everyone who uses it on a regular basis. If you go on any random Twitter account, I would bet there's a 95% chance that at some point they have tweeted about how terrible the website is, how they hate the new update, or how they absolutely have to take a break from tweeting for a month or so because this website is just not good for their mental health. Having been on Twitter myself now, I completely understand. I've heard it referred to as "the blue hell site" a few times, but I feel Twitter is more like the toxic f*ckboy that the entire internet shares a history with. We know he's no good for us, but we just can't stop going back. And speaking of toxic men:
Men will appear out of nowhere to offer their opinion, even if you didn't ask for it. I will say that I am writing this based on my own experience as a visible woman on the internet, so it's quite possible that people whose gender appears differently on Twitter would have a different experience, but this does seem to be a common occurrence for women on the website. More than once, I have had men jump into my mentions to tell me things that I certainly didn't ask for their views on, everything from the history of Welsh nationalism to my crush on Megan Rapinoe. Topic, context, and whether or not you follow each other - nothing so trivial as these will prevent a Twitter man from giving his two cents, whether you like it or not. The problem is so severe that even as I write this I am convinced that, should a Twitter man read this post, they will suddenly emerge on here or the hellsite to contest what I've written. Such is the life of a woman on the internet.
In conclusion, Twitter is a strange and terrible place and also probably my favourite social media website at the moment. No doubt I will continue to learn much more in my time on there, unless of course I end up getting banned or leaving as so many have done before me. I'd like to know the thoughts of other people who are on Twitter - even if you are a man, who in this case I am giving permission to share their opinions with me, except on the subject of women's experience on social media. Other women tweeters (twitterers? Twitter users?): I'd love to hear what you think (either on here or elsewhere) and if you've had any similar encounters to the ones I've mentioned. Being a woman on the internet is always a trial, but as ever, Twitter remains uniquely challenging.
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