On Twitter

by Toby Payne-Cook

I am forty-eight years old. I love meeting new people. I am a non-conformist. If someone says something is black, I am tempted to suggest it is white, and vice versa. My errant worldview is a contorted melange of myriad shades of grey. I’m provocative. I’m opinionated. I love a good rant. I’m also rather partial to laughter and a sense of the ridiculous.

But underneath the mixed up personality I present to the world is someone, I hope, who is self-aware, kind, tolerant, empathetic, romantic and full of love. I hope that I act with integrity and honesty; sometimes brutal and self-sacrificing at times. This person is also wracked with self-doubt, is over-sensitive and craves affirmation, attention and love.

The person described in the top paragraph was made for Twitter. The person in the second paragraph should stay well away from its toxic algorithms and misrepresentation of people’s inner being.

I’ve largely enjoyed my Twitter odyssey since October 2018 and I have definitely “met” a handful of genuinely brilliant, wonderful fellow humans. All along, I have known that the behaviours and views of people on Twitter are – in the most part – skewed, distorted and frequently narrow versions of themselves. There are very few people who reveal themselves deeply and directly on such a platform.

But more recently, I’ve noticed something very strange. I’ve noticed how pervasive and disruptive it is. I’ve noticed that people on twitter fall into four fairly distinct camps:

1. The downright silly. The funny. The insightful. The witty. (<10%)
2. The self-promoters and self-appointed curators of humanity. (~50%)
3. The reactive, sensitive and downtrodden. (~40%)
4. Those fools who try to bridge all three of the above camps. Including me, I hope. (<5%)

There are of course three other camps beyond the all consuming Twitterverse:

5. The vast majority of humans who have never, nor will ever, go near such a dangerous, harmful technology.

6. Those who’ve been on Twitter and have been damaged by it, hounded off it, broken and hopefully glued back together after irreversibly leaving its toxic shores.

7. The intermittent addicts. Those who know it is shit. Those who hate what it does to them. Those who leave, often making a great big song and dance about it but then return because there’s approximately six people on Twitter who they’ve never met in the flesh but they really like and they somehow give their life meaning and a sense of belonging and they can’t quite live without its frippery, fun and fuckwittery. This category applies to me and overlaps with those in category 4) above.

One of the things that astounds me most about my fellow twitter users (and I am not immune to this either, otherwise I’d be in category 5 or 6 above) is how easily influenced and persuaded we are by the content we encounter on the platform. And I mean persuaded for or against. Most twitter users have grown up in the internet age but some of us can remember a time before all this sharing, over sharing, opinionating, ranting and narcississing. Matthew Syed recently called it out in a great article in the Times, in a wondrous repose to the soundbite, misrepresented, headline grabbing, like seeking godawful ‘journalistic’ style of Piers Morgan on TV media but also spent sometime unpicking the toxicity of Twitter.

We all know this.

Yet so many of us, even the self-proclaimed intelligentsia (yes that includes me, and probably you if you are reading this) somehow overlook this. We argue irrationally about the flies swarming around the crusty pile of shit and completely ignore why the flies are there in the first place. Our behaviour; our manners; our decorum; our angst; our defensiveness; our sensitivity; our victim status; our disillusion; our aggressive, manipulative quote tweeting and most significantly our outrage are all surface features of our deeper emotional and psychological experiences and perhaps our innate characters too.

I have recent personal experience of separation, pending divorce, from my wife of twenty years. There are many brilliant, wonderful aspects to her but the final straw for me was how we kept having the same surface argument (for most of our marriage) without ever addressing or acknowledging the subtext. This applies to the vast majority of arguments. We are so often really arguing about something else while picking a fight about something utterly futile on the surface. We misrepresent something the other person has said (or not said) in the futile, surface argument; cajole our followers and it all kicks off. The surface spat is never the real issue. The real issue is that person in the “other team” has either wronged you, or one of your close affiliates in the past or more likely the ‘other’ has very different, deeply held educational, political or moral values to you.

I hope that I have the wisdom, life experience and wherewithal to realise this most of the time and just watch from the sidelines. I regularly retweet or quote articles I largely agree with, or that subscribe and conform to my nuanced, subjective worldview. This positively enhances my echo chamber, I concur. But I abhor, and I hope I don’t do it, the negative quote tweet: when we send around someone else’s perfectly valid, well reasoned idea or article and append a negative, disparaging, disdainful comment to compound our own twisted version of the truth. Those who do this, and I follow and quite like / admire a few of them, seem to have arrived at a position of unwavering confidence that their views, values and life experience are more “right” than those of their nemesis. I really don’t like this.

There will be many who tell me that is what Twitter is for. It is for debate and dialogue and developing ideas. And that we all know the terms of engagement in advance. And if we don’t like it, we can piss off and join the growing army of number sixes above.

I’m afraid I disagree.

People are falsely strengthened in their position. Extreme views become normalised. You have to pick a side.

Twitter is a great tool for developing confirmation bias. For finding kindred spirits with very similar worldviews. It is a pretty rubbish tool for debate. Debate may even be a pretty rubbish tool for debate. A random, spontaneous conversation over coffee, beer, wine or herbal tea likely to find oneself and your opponent far more open-minded and mentally agile than on the left or right of the speaker or chairperson.

Twitter is a game for many. The blocking, the muting, the follows and unfollows. It is a good game. Particularly when played with sound mind. But the self-righteousness gets a bit much sometimes.

I follow a broad spectrum of educators and teachers on here. Most of the ones I really care about follow me back. There are one or two interesting, smart, clever, witty, Gibbesque people who are widely followed with a significant influence who don’t follow me back. There are one or two fundamentally juxtaposed, smart, clever, witty, vehemently anti-Gibbesque people with a significant influence who do follow me back (probably because my echo chamber and worldview is skewed in this direction). What I find absolutely astonishing is how both – apparently smart – different sides of these polarised educational insights, experiences, politics and values so rarely acknowledge that their beef is not with what was said or unsaid; inferred or not even mentioned at all – rather it is with that person’s fundamental values, morals or their remarkably similar and hypocritical, condemnable Twitter behaviour and affront.

Yes, I am referring to the ongoing spats between the uber-traditionalist, secondary teaching, behaviourists and the child development experts and EYFS warriors. I find it impossible to see the world exclusively from either extreme. But, on balance, I think the manners, behaviour and decorum of the child development experts and EYFS warriors to be closer to the behaviour I would like to see from genuinely open-minded, considerate and decent human beings.

So, I – nor anyone I admire or follow on Twitter is the Twitter police, or the curator of the Twitter rules. And I, nor you individually, have the power to influence or change any of this.

But, I’ll tell you what harm it does. It diminishes my trust in teachers. It does not present teachers engaged with #Edutwitter in a collectively positive light. It alienates me from all the good aspects of #Edutwitter. It moves me from number 4 to number 7 and towards number 6. It makes me want to scream – check yourselves people.

And worse, it diminishes my trust and faith in people.

Coming Next:

My next blog post will pick up on another recent area of infuriating Twitterspattery. That of writing. Teaching writing. Inspiring writing. About writing. Writers, poets, English teachers, exams, primary school teachers. Clearly, I am Jackie Weaver on this topic – I have no authority but I do have opinions, experience and I hope my own distinct brand of obtuse wisdom to share!