social media cartoon
© Bráulio Amado


Twitter rewards us for our mistakes. It isn't designed to let us grow up.


It appears we're in the midst of yet another Twitter backlash. Marquee users have been slowly backing away from their feeds (or slipping off the grid entirely); last week, Twitter's stock plunged by more than 20 percent after the company reported a decline in monthly users.

The arguments for defection are at this point familiar: Twitter is a dark reservoir of hatred, home to the diseased national id. It turns us into our worst selves - dehumanizing us, deranging us, keying us up, beating us down, turning us into shrieking outrage monkeys hellbent on the innocents of Oz. It uncomplicates complicated discussion; stealth-curates our news; hijacks our dopamine systems, carrying us off on a devil's quest for ever more dime bags of retweets and likes.

All of which feels painfully right, at least on the Twitter that I know, which mainly concerns itself with current affairs and political opinion. The question is why. Most Twitter users know that the medium has an unfortunate tendency to transform adults into anxious adolescents. But perhaps it's time to start thinking about this problem clinically. The fact is, Twitter is changing us - regressing us - in ways developmental psychologists would find weirdly recognizable.

The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson once wrote that adolescence is a time when children can be "morbidly, often curiously, preoccupied with what they appear to be in the eyes of others." This concern, it's safe to say, is true of many Twitter users, and it's hard not to think of one politician in particular to whom this observation rather morbidly, curiously applies. Should we be surprised that a man who's so frequently compared to a needy adolescent has chosen Twitter as his favorite medium?

A corollary to Erikson's observation might be that of David Elkind, another developmental psychologist, who in 1967 wrote about the "imaginary audience" phenomenon in adolescents - the idea that teenagers somehow see themselves as stars of their own productions, believing themselves to be watched by an eager, if sometimes judgmental, public.

On Twitter, you actually are living your life on a stage. "It's the imaginary audience come to life," said Marion Underwood, a psychologist who studies adolescent aggression and internet use. "By posting a picture or a tweet, you get immediate feedback, which is extraordinarily reinforcing." Here, again, is our president: obsessed with his ratings, obsessed with his inaugural crowd size, obsessed with how many spools of coverage he gets each morning on "Fox & Friends." He is always playing to that imaginary audience (which, in the case of his inaugural crowd, was indeed partly imaginary).

And if we were being honest, we'd probably concede that political and opinion Twitter has made many otherwise well-adjusted people a bit obsessed with their new publics, checking just a bit too frequently whether that brilliant aperçu they just typed has begun its viral zoom. (Politicians and pundits: not exactly creatures known for their secure egos.)

A few years back, the sociologist Robert Faris described high school to me as "a large box of strangers." The kids don't necessarily share much in common, after all; they just happen to be the same age and live in the same place. So what do they do in this giant box to give it order, structure? They divide into tribes and resort to aggression to determine status.

The same can be said of Twitter. It's the ultimate large box of strangers. As in high school, Twitter denizens divide into tribes and bully to gain status; as in high school, too-confessional musings and dumb mistakes turn up in the wrong hands and end in humiliation.

Clay Shirky, one of the shrewdest internet theorists around, has noted that the faster the medium is, the more emotional it gets. Twitter, as we know, is pretty fast, and therefore runs pretty hot. (Emotional tweets, research has shown, travel more swiftly than anodyne ones.) We often become creatures of our limbic systems when we tweet. Our self-regulation deserts us (been there); our prefrontal cortex, responsible for executive function and impulse control, goes offline; we become reward-seeking Scud missiles, addicts in search of a fix.

We become, in other words, teenagers, who are notoriously poor models of self-regulation - in large part because their prefrontal cortices are still developing and their dopamine circuits are pretty busy seeking stimulation. The psychologist Laurence Steinberg describes adolescents as "cars with powerful accelerators and weak brakes." The neuroscientist BJ Casey deems them "more Kirk than Spock."

The hormonal Twitter brain may even explain the typographical preferences of our president. You know who likes all caps? Teenagers. BECAUSE THEY HAVE VERY STRONG FEELINGS ABOUT THINGS, O.K.?

Do we really want something so important, so vital, as our political conversation to be conducted in a teenage register and defined by teenage behaviors? Do we really want to have this discussion on a medium that makes us lose sight of our adult selves?

Not all of Twitter is uncivil. It varies a great deal by neighborhood. Doctor Twitter is not real estate Twitter is not gardening-enthusiast Twitter. Not all of political Twitter is devoid of rational discussion, either. There are thoughtful participants who make me think, make me laugh, direct me to news and analyses I'd never otherwise see.

And I do not mean to suggest that Twitter can't be a force for good. That it gives voices to the voiceless and a lifeline to the isolated can't be underestimated. Whenever anyone proposes boycotting social media altogether, Mr. Shirky always answers: Fine. Got a way to do that while protecting #blacklivesmatter and #metoo?


Comment: Clearly the author has a very selective perspective on the "good" Twitter is able to embody in people. Her examples of #blacklivesmatter and #metoo, while perhaps intended to be forces for good, have degenerated into the worst of kind mob mentalities that the platform enables.


But something is wrong with this ecosystem. Too often, as Jaron Lanier notes in his recent jeremiad on social media, we think we're controlling it when it's controlling us.

And yes, I'm as susceptible to Twitter excesses and indiscretions as anyone. I've tried recently to scale back. (I know. You didn't notice. I was never particularly good at it.) But really, I should stop. I should show up for things I love - movie and book news, pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope, funerals. Twitter does a beautiful funeral. Remembering-Philip-Roth Twitter was so much better than Trump's-Deep-State-Paranoia Twitter, the Side B option of my feed that day.

It's probably not an accident that it takes a glimpse of our own mortality to turn us into our most deliberative, mature selves on this medium.

Most parents of teenagers will tell you that the best response to adolescent deviltry, tough as it is, is to let kids make their own mistakes and hope that one day they realize they're inflicting harm.

The problem is, Twitter rewards us for our mistakes. It isn't designed to let us grow up. The time in our lives we were so happy to leave behind - the time cruelties were experienced with an especial intensity - we are living all over again. For all we know, the effects of the new unkindness we've sown may be just as hard to undo.