…it will be for the best. Not just because it’s a chronically addictive abuse sluice that turns all its users into self-important idiots, as the common critique goes, but also because of the incalculable damage it’s caused to the art of writing.
Twitter has transformed the way people write, the way thoughts are articulated and communicated. Even the way thoughts are formed. Not just on the app itself, not only online writing more generally, but writing in all its forms. And not just from its users’ own habits leaking out into their wider writing lives, but also from non-users unwittingly mimicking its ubiquity.
This is not a novel critique. The way in which writing has succumbed absolutely to the economic logic of social media is well documented (including by myself). But this work mostly focuses on the way it reduces writing to its shareability, its capacity to validate that which the sharer was already thinking. This is writing as intellectual capital: the exchange-value of ‘clout’ debasing the use-value of the aesthetic dimension. This is all readily apparent, and has been hugely detrimental to all online-germinated social movements and trends in cultural criticism in the 2010s.
More destructive, though, is the effect on writing’s composition. A huge amount of work produced now is wholly influenced by the formal constraints of Tweeting. The apparent promise of Twitter, as a so-called ‘microblogging’ platform, was the primacy it would inherently give to short, snappy writing: easily composed, easily read, easily shared. But this virtue of brevity is nowhere to be seen now, if it ever was. Instead, people attempt to pack so much content into the 240-character limit of a single Tweet that sentences can barely support their own weight, so fit to burst are they with more content than they can reasonably contain. The result, more often than not, is aggrandised word salad. This is to say nothing of the Twitter ‘thread’, surely the most unreadable writing format ever devised.
Because of its addictive nature and ease of use, practising writers have spent the last decade or so spilling out far more words on Twitter than any other creative outlet they may turn to in their daily lives. So it’s little wonder that this stultifying style has grown to dominate far beyond the platform’s borders.
So many books published today read like a compilation of Tweets simply reformatted for the physical page: a churn of vaguely connected statements that may flow together thematically but are found to be lacking in any literary elegance, any through-composed flow. They don’t forward an argument beyond itself, or elucidate a concept to which the reader hasn’t given due attention, but rather are phrases written in search of a reward for their mere utterance, unsatisfactorily mimicking the instant response that awaits a bombastic Tweet.
(By the way: I can’t write for shit these days, if I ever could, so I’m probably demonstrating the very characteristics I lambast as I’m lambasting them. It’s happened to me too.)
I recently found myself browsing through the major Blogspot sites I used to read, prompted by a revisiting of Alex Niven’s really useful guide to Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts. This really was the Golden Age of Online Writing, and its influence looms large over critical and cultural thought in the UK and beyond. It was a really visceral experience to browse it all again. A rush of nostalgia as I remembered just how eye-opening – life-changing, even, I suppose – blogs by the likes of Rhian E Jones, Owen Hatherley, Mark Fisher, Adam Harper and countless more were for me. But it was also an intensely melancholic process, for every single site I visited was dormant, its activity dwindling to almost nothing by around 2016 at the absolute latest, and even a decade earlier in some cases.
It’s no coincidence that this death broadly coincides with the period in which Twitter completely took over as The Place Online Where Things Happen. So much was lost in this transition. At its best, the ‘blogosphere’ functioned as one giant hypertext: a patchwork of platforms that all cross-referenced one another. A real, organic, intellectual ecosystem, totally cannibalised by the relentless growth of social media.
Most melancholic of all was how this all feels so lost and consigned to the past, as if none of the actual content has made it through to the present day, as if to say that nothing of lasting value can be found. While thankfully a lot of this spirit was captured (and probably driven to a wider audience) by the launch of Zer0 Books and later Repeater, it cannot replicate the unique possibility of the hypertext, a form that the singular algorithmic social media feed can never match.
It would be a great joy if the collapse and fragmentation of text-based social media could spurn an unlikely revival of the critical-writing hypertext. It would do all jobbing and amateur critics the world of good to start a blog (or revive their previous attempts), and curate an RSS feed to keep track of others doing the same. It would ferment a level of critical thought and creative fulfilment that Twitter has proven to be totally antithetical to.
Disposable Everything 