Since Alex Gaynor wrote his seminal thinkpiece on the subject, “I Hope Twitter Goes Away”, I’ve been wrestling to define my relationship to this often problematic product.

On the one hand, Twitter has provided me with delightful interactions with human beings who I would not otherwise have had the opportunity to meet or interact with. If you are the sort of person who likes following people, four suggestions I’d make on that front are Melissa 🔔, Gary Bernhardt, Eevee and Matt Blaze, all of whom have blogs but none of whom I would have discovered without Twitter.

Twitter has also allowed me to reach a larger audience with my writing than I otherwise would have been able to. Lots of people click on links to this blog from Twitter either from following me directly or from a retweet. (Thank you, retweeters, one and all.)

On the other hand, the effect of using Twitter on my productivity is like having a constant, low-grade headache. While Twitter has never been a particularly bad distraction as measured by hours spent on it (I keep metrics on that, and it’s rarely even in the top 10), I feel like consulting Twitter is something I do when I am stuck, or having to think about something hard. “I’ll just check Twitter” is an easy way to “take a break” right at the moment that I ought to be thinking harder, eliminating distractions, mustering my will to focus.

This has been particularly stark for me as I’ve been trying to get some real writing done over the last couple of weeks and have been consistently drawing a blank. Given that I have a deadline coming up on Wednesday and another next Monday, something had to give.

Or, as Joss Whedon put it, when he quit Twitter:

If I’m going to start writing again, I have to go to the quiet place, and this is the least quiet place I’ve ever been in my life.

I’m an introvert, and using Twitter is more like being at a gigantic, awkward party all the time than any other online space I’ve ever been in.

There’s an irony here. Mostly what people like that I put on Twitter (and yes, I’ve checked) are announcements that link to other things, accomplishments in other areas, like a blog post, or a feature in Twisted, but using Twitter itself is inimical to completing those things.

I’m loath to abandon the positive aspects of Twitter. Some people also use Twitter as a replacement for RSS, and I don’t want to break the way they choose to pay attention to the stuff that I do. And a few of my friends communicate exclusively through direct messages.

The really “good” thing about Twitter is discovery. It enables you to discover people, content, and, eugh, “brands” that appeal to you. I have discovered things that I enjoy many times. The fundamental problem I am facing, which is a little bit hard to admit to oneself, is that I have discovered enough. I have enough games to play, enough books and articles to read, enough podcasts to listen to, enough movies to watch, enough code to write, enough open source libraries to investigate, that I will be busy for years based on what I already know.

For me, using Twitter’s timeline at this point to “discover” more things is like being at a delicious buffet, being so full I’m nauseous, and stuffing my pockets with shrimp “just in case” I’m hungry “when I get home” - and then, of course, not going home.

Even disregarding my desire to produce useful content, if I just want to enjoy consuming content more deeply, I have to take the time to engage with it properly.

So here’s what I’m doing:

1. I am turning on the “anyone can direct message me” feature. We’ll see how that goes; I may have to turn it off again later. As always, I’d prefer you send email (or text me, if it’s time-critical).
2. I am unfollowing literally everyone, and will not follow people in the future. Checking my timeline was the main information junk-food I want to avoid.
3. Since my timeline, rather than mentions and replies, was my main source of distraction, I’ll continue paying attention to mentions and replies (at least for now; I’ll have to see if that becomes a problem in the absence of a timeline).
4. In order to avoid producing such information junk-food myself, I’m going to try to directly tweet less, and put more things into brief blog posts so I have enough room to express them. I won’t say “not at all”, but most of the things that I put on Twitter would really be better as longer, more thoughtful articles.

Please note that there’s nothing prescriptive here. I’m outlining what I’m doing in the hopes that others might recognize similar problems with themselves - if everyone used Twitter this way, there would hardly be a point to the site.

Also, if I’ve unfollowed you, that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in what you have to say. I already have a way of keeping in touch with people’s more fully-formed ideas: I use Blogtrottr to deliver relevant blog articles to my email. If I previously followed you and you think I might not be reading your blog already (in most cases I believe I already am), please feel free to drop me a line with an RSS link.

Greg Price expresses a common opinion here:

The bile for Facebook among Oculus fans is eye-opening. I think every one of the top 200 comments is negative. http://t.co/6j3x9zrEta

— Greg Price (@gnprice) March 26, 2014

I myself had a similar reaction; despite not being particularly invested in VR specifically (I was not an Oculus backer) I felt pretty negatively about the fact that Facebook was the acquirer. I wasn’t quite sure why, at first, and after some reflection I’d like to share my thoughts with you on both why this is a bad thing and also why gamers, in particular, were disturbed by it.

The Oculus Rift really captured the imagination of the gaming community’s intelligentsia. John Carmack’s imprimatur alone was enough to get people interested, but the real power of the Oculus was to finally deliver on the promise of all those unbelievably clunky virtual reality headsets that we’ve played around with at one time or another.

The promise of Virtual Reality is, of course, to transport us so completely to another place and time that we cease to even be aware of the real world. It is that experience, that complete and overwhelming sense of being in an imagined place, that many gamers are looking for when they sit down in front of an existing game. It is the aspiration to that experience that makes “immersive” such a high compliment in game criticism.

Personally, immersion in a virtual world was the beginning of my real interest in computers. I’ve never been the kind of gamer who felt the need to be intensely competitive. I didn’t really care about rules and mechanics that much, at least not for their own sake. In fact, the term “gamer” is a bit of a misnomer - I’m more a connoisseur of interactive experiences. The very first “game” I remember really enjoying was Zork. Although Zork is a goal-directed game you can “win”, that didn’t interest me. Instead, I enjoyed wandering around the environments it provided, and experimenting with different actions to see what the computer would do.

Computer games are not really just one thing. The same term, “games”, encompasses wildly divergent experiences including computerized Solitaire, Silent Hill, Dyad, and Myst. Nevertheless, I think that pursuit of immersion – on really, fully, presently paying attention to an interactive experience – is a primary reason that “gamers” feel the need to distinguish themselves (ourselves?) from the casual computing public. Obviously, the fans of Oculus are among those most focused on immersive experiences.

Gamers feel the need to set themselves apart because computing today is practically defined by a torrential cascade of things that we’re only barely paying attention to. What makes computing “today” different than the computing of yesteryear is that computing used to be about thinking, and now it’s about communication.

The advent of social media has left us not only focused on communication, but focused on constant, ephemeral, shallow communication. This is not an accident. In our present economy there is, after all, no such thing as a “social media business” (or, indeed, a “search engine business”); there are only ad agencies.

The purveyors of social media need you to be engaged enough with your friends that you won’t leave their sites, so there is some level of entertainment or interest they must bring to their transactions with you, of course; but they don’t want you to be so engaged that a distracting advertisement would be obviously crass and inappropriate. Lighthearted banter, pictures of shiba inus, and shallow gossip are fantastic fodder for this. Less so are long, soul-searching long-form writing explaining and examining your feelings.

An ad for cat food might seem fine if you’re chuckling at a picture of a dog in a hoodie saying “wow, very meme, such meta”. It’s less likely to drive you through to the terminus of that purchase conversion funnel if you’re intently focused on supporting a friend who is explaining to you how a cancer scare drove home how they’re doing nothing with their life, or how your friend’s sibling has run away from home and your friend doesn’t know if they’re safe.

Even if you’re a highly social extrovert, the dominant emotion that this torrent of ephemeral communication produces is, at best, sarcastic amusement. More likely, it produces constant anxiety. We do not experience our better selves when we’re not really paying focused attention to anything¹. As Community Season 5 Episode 8 recently put it, somewhat more bluntly: “Mark Zuckerberg is Fidel Castro in flip-flops.”

I think that despite all the other reasons we’re all annoyed - the feelings of betrayal around the Kickstarter, protestations of Facebook’s creepyness, and so on - the root of the anger around the Facebook acquisition is the sense that this technology with so much potential to reverse the Balkanization of our attention has now been put directly into the hands of those who created the problem in the first place.

So now, instead of looking forward to a technology that will allow us to visit a world of pure imagination, we now eagerly await something that will shove distracting notifications and annoying advertisements literally an inch away from our eyeballs. Probably after charging us several hundred dollars for the privilege.

It seems to me that’s a pretty clear justification for a few hundred negative reddit comments.