Here’s what’s weird about Twitter

Late last night, I thought I’d determined, once and for all, one of the primary sources of conflict on Twitter.

This is what I was thinking.

There are two way to use Twitter. One is to achieve a sense of proximity between people who in real life aren't associated. It provides them with a way in which to expand a social life's borders beyond the physical. To make new friends and/or alienate people with a certain splash of intimacy.

The other way to approach it is to treat twitter like a stage, where you're addressing a crowd of any number of people. Maybe there are twelve of them, maybe 12,000, maybe a lot more. You’re saying something big and important, when you use it like this, and/or you’re making a fool of yourself. You're being loud.

These two approaches to Twitter are in serious conflict with one another.

Really there should be two different Twitters, one for the former crowd, the other for the latter. But instead everyone is thrown together into one boiling pot.

And I don’t know how they could do it otherwise. The two approaches to Twitter are not so distinct from one another. A lot of users are constantly moving between one approach and the other.

But the effect is something like how it would be if, in high school, you took all the quiet loners and made them occupy the same space all day as the loudmouths and braggarts who are putting on a show for an audience of people who would rather be anywhere else. I can’t imagine what that would be like.

My downstairs cat is meowing at me. She is telling me I’ve taken this too far.