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Out-Tweet the Void

I couldn't fit it in 280 characters.

By Public MistakePublished 6 years ago 4 min read
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The biggest step of my transition from awkward young human to confident person was to learn when to stop trying to say something. To remain silent. I'm the geeky kid that felt that he could say something in class and be rewarded for it. I was the textbook definition of a trained monkey who couldn't get enough of vocal rewards.

Twitter is making me “feel the void that needs to be filled” all over again. There are threads of tweets left unanswered, polls on which people ask for your opinion, inflammatory pricks that need lecturing. Community managers that demand your participation. Twitter is built up to be the opposite of silence, the response to silence. Twitter is the everlasting Tchip, the overarching noise, and every time someone I follow tweets something that seems relevant or interesting, I make myself present, like, answer, retweet. My mind is unable to stay idle as I wait for a retweet, an answer, a like even, back. I’m never dropping this ball, not looking away from my phone. I’m always looking for someone, a follower to throw the ball back to me.

There is something innately childish about all this. I don't mean that twitter emulates childhood, but that it is coming from it. It brings back behaviors that are deemed egotistical, violent, inappropriate for actual-bodied experience. Those meet little to no response or consequences on Twitter. And yet someone might be firing me tomorrow for my hot take on Lena Dunham that everybody dies to hear about, I'm sure.

We’re experiencing and reverberating at an insane speed of echolocation the minute, the ephemeral again, the everlasting chirping, and we are almost always rewarded for it.

Twitter is a gigantic classroom where a basic understanding of english seems to be the key for never-ending interactions. People tweet about the movie they are watching, the people they see on the bus, the political stance their uncles are taking, the mileage of their car. A nation divided by the color of a dress, generates more tweets than the color of our skins. (Blue Dress Exists) We’re taking kindergarten back in our public lives. A ray of light that makes ember of dust gets the coverage of 20,000 tweets. Something as faint and joyous, infinitesimal as the grammatically flunky, wonder-filled comment a young kid addresses to their parent on the way to school about a new bird they’ve never seen before, a plane trailblazing their sky, or the Sponge-bob shaped booger in their nose can now be part of the diary of recorded times.

It’s… exhausting and I can’t seem to stop recording, phrasing, correcting amending looking for the perfect encapsulation of my current thought. Everything seems worthy of sharing. (please like and subscribe if you like and subscribe for more tweets and more hot takes) We had 140 characters, we have 280 because, because, maybe we're afraid the void will be back to eat us? Have all the 140 characters tweets disappeared? Shit. I should check.

Threads made of tweets by this journalist, this political activist, this loiterer in a parking lot waiting for his Uber are getting into the fabric of public discourse, and we're still doubting about the consequences, as we’re not certain if the voices have an impact on the real world, or if Twitter has become the only place of prime importance and if the Third Reich is ultimately part of it, and branded A Okay. Step away, death instinct, tweet instinct is here to replace you.

My public stool is in my bathrooms. The typing of a n-word in Texas will creates a tweet-storm in Los Angeles. Someone made a joke and got a book deal out of it, someone fought oppression and got a pat in the back by Captain America. Words contaminate, and hashtags are "rhizomatic" viruses, that wire us and we are dangling between the new ones and the next, high on it here for it ready for it. But your tweet, it got lost in the noise. Well, you got a like!

Everything is so devoid of touch, of smell.

There is no smell to conversations, there is no pheromones telling us to hate someone and feel threatened, or intrigued by someone else. Bad grammar, blue check-marks, American flags, parenthesis, and curse words have replaced our organic sense of judging the other, the one I don’t know. My guts can't tell me this guy's guts stink, and I most probably won't kill him in a duel. His mother is obese, though, that I can tell him, he will learn the error of his way thusly. The only physical property that remains is the itch we have to scratch, and the fingies we use to appease it.

We used to look away from words to read the room. In Twitter, it is not a matter of gazes, of shivers down our spines, of sniffles that annoy, of perfume that is deemed too sweet, or armpits, too foul. Hints and interactions are made of pink hearts and cute whale-like speech bubbles in our bells, but those are often filled with FUCK YOU WHORES.

Twitter user, when was the last time silence happened to you?

(BTW, you can follow me on Twitter @publicmistake)

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About the Creator

Public Mistake

They told me you couldn't compare Madame Bovary and Fargo. They were absolutely right. But I did it anyway.

What's up? I have articles about everything, Soft Boys, Alien, Twitter, I might write something about avodado spread, IDK.

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