Twitter Feels Like Highschool Because You're Being Molded by Highschoolers
đ” Oh oh, oh oh oh-oh, oh oh oh-oh, oh oh oh-oh HEY đ”
I use âTwitterâ a lot here, but this applies to all forms of âeveryone-to-everyoneâ communication on the Internet (that is to say: social media)
Inarguably (just try it, buddy; see what happens), one of the primary appeals of Social Media is the opportunity to shape public opinion. We might phrase this as âsharing your voice,â âbeing heard,â or in some other way that similarly alludes to the idea that posting on Social Media is reclaiming some human right that was stolen from you, but the root motive is obvious: other people donât think the same as I do, and Iâm going to fix that1.
Due to the dynamics of Twitter, youâre not going to succeed in this mission. You will never actually change the hearts and minds of a meaningful number of people, but you will be subconsciously convinced that youâre constantly on the verge of this, due to the drip-feed of affirmation that comes in the form of âengagementâ with your posts.
Your Sisyphean efforts to shape Twitter will never bear meaningful results, but Twitter will shape you with ease.
As social creatures, we are products of our environment. From the day we are born, we begin learning the boundaries of our world through our observations of others: directly, by what they scold, praise, punish, and reward us for; and indirectly, by the reactions to our peersâ behavior that we cannot help but notice and learn from. We never grow out of this â every new job, book club, or poker night has a unique social makeup that we are forced to adapt to.
Twitter is much like these environments, with three key differences:
Itâs the size of the entire fucking world
There exist tangible, countable social currencies (Likes, Views, Retweets, Follower Count, etc.) which unavoidably manipulate your perspective on a tweet or a person
Donât pretend you donât know what âRatioâdâ means
Literal children are engaging with you on this platform as peers
I could/should/wonât write a whole post on the first point, but Iâll say this: it is painfully obvious to me that our minds are simply not equipped to deal with a social system the size of the entire planet, with billions of participants.
We are highly attuned to the subtle (and not-so-subtle) signals that are given off in social groups, and we obey them almost without thinking. We identify the members of the group who are viewed by the others as being authority figures; funny; unintelligent; annoying; or just there. We do this largely by observing the intra-group interactions: Who got laughs for a mediocre joke? Whose idea was dismissed without consideration? Whose idea was given too much consideration? Who canât seem to get a word in edgewise? Who commands the room? Whoâs kinda cute, and whoâs just a mess?
This works well for groups of people in the real world (though it can of course result in toxic dynamics), but it completely breaks down at the Internet scale. There are simply too many people, too many dynamics, to ever hope to scratch the surface. We need a different approach if weâre to make sense of it.
Enter the currencies of social media: likes, retweets, follower counts, ratios. Itâs impossible to have actual human group dynamics at this scale, so fuck it: letâs just slap some numbers on every post and account, and this will make everything much simpler. Where we used to gain validation by having a respected member of a group side with your position or disagree in a respectful way, we now feed off of random strangers depositing a Like into our social account.
I donât mean to imply that human beings were perfectly rational actors in social dynamics before the Internet. Of course we werenât. We had different social currencies, and we offloaded our thinking onto them, just as we do now. But the scale of it; the ability to literally quantify these currencies; the removal of the actual human element; these things are different.
Itâs not that we used to have a perfect social system. Itâs just that this one has taken all the terrible aspects of the old one and made them somehow worse.
It bears repeating: actual idiot children are on this very platform with you, and you are accepting them as your peers. This is not because you desire to do so, but rather due to the dehumanization, information scarcity, and aggregation inherent to social media. In real life, if a highschooler tries to engage in moral grandstanding or exchange ideas as if they are your equal, your mind is easily able to put things into perspective: this is a child, Iâm an adult, and I shouldnât take anything they say very seriously. You cannot do this on Twitter, because A) you do not actually know if the tweet you just read was written by a child, and B) a childâs âLikeâ is worth the same as an adultâs, and you are not as resistant to the impact of said social currency as youâd like to think.
Consider that there is nobody (save for even younger children) with more free time in the world than a highschooler; nobody with less self control; nobody with a greater desire to differentiate themselves and be heard. They do not have full-time jobs, support a family, or have any real responsibilities whatsoever during Summer, so they have more time than you do to waste on Twitter. Their ability to limit their consumption of anything, let alone something as addictive as social media, is near nonexistent, so they have less reason to not post whatever they think at any given moment than you do. They are coming into themselves, discovering who they are, forming their own opinions for the first time, and aching to be taken seriously â so they have every incentive to push and push and push. You cannot compete with them; you cannot out-tweet them.
The term âConfidence Manâ exists for a reason: we respond very positively to confidence. If someone is steadfastly sure of themselves, with an unwavering commitment to that which they are saying, we are predisposed to believe that there must be something they know that we donât. Beyond that, someone who is confident in their position is more intimidating: if you disagree with them, especially publicly, you know that you need to strike with equal or greater confidence of your own. Nobody is more confident than a highschooler on the Internet. Nobody. The only defense against their confidence is knowing that their confidence comes from being extremely stupid â but because we donât know that theyâre a highschooler in the first place, we donât actually know this.
Nobody wants to go back to high school; if they do, thereâs something wrong with them. The primary reason for this is that high schoolers are sociopathic master manipulators2. Sure, sometimes they beat the living shit out of one another, but their preferred method to damage one another is public humiliation and social control. They are very good at this, and they lack the empathy necessary to restrain themselves. Why the fuck did we let them on the internet?
Social media is a massive social competition, and unbeknownst to you, you are competing with children who â for all the reasons above â are far better at winning than you are. Twitter optimizes for everything that teenagers are masters of. You cannot beat them, but without realizing it, youâve been trying. When you canât beat them, youâre going to join them. In your vain attempt to eke out an existence in the social media hellscape, you have learned the rules of the game and adapted to them; in doing so, you have become a teenager.
But arenât most teenagers on Instagram and TikTok? Twitter is passĂ©; this whole thing is overblown.
Kind of. Thereâs still a lot of them on Twitter. The fundamental problem, though, is that the terms âteenagerâ and âhighschoolerâ arenât actually defined by age in this context. When you interact with teenagers on the internet, they mold you into one of their own, and you proceed to infect others. Further, the fundamental structure of social media not only rewards teenagers, but metastasizes them: you cannot truly grow and mature as a person while you surround yourself by other permanent children.
Iâve focused on how teenagers are basically ruining the Internet (and itâs true!), but I think theyâre also the primary victims of all of this. Weâre supposed to nurture them; guide them; mentor them. Instead, we set them loose into the abyss of human psychological horror, gave them the tools to remake it in their image, and expected that this would turn out just fine. It is not fine. We are failing them, and there will be consequences.
I donât have a conclusion. Just stop using social media. You canât reclaim it. It is lost.
For reasons that are far too complex and sophisticated to explain, this obviously doesnât apply to blogs, so donât even bother trying that one
Teenage Psychology: A Study on Fear (Way et al., 2007)