It will come as no surprise to most of you that I am woefully addicted to Twitter. I believe this is my 11th year on the platform and it has brought me an incalculable amount of joy. It has also wasted an infinite amount of time. And, yes, it has caused me deep pain and sorrow.
It is, frankly, the river of information that I bunk up to every day. I have “Twitter friends;” I have “Twitter enemies;” and I have folks that I am still on the fence about. So does nearly everyone that I know that uses Twitter regularly.
The same could be said for most social media platforms that raise communities like Facebook and Instagram. But for me, my drug of choice is Twitter.
Some of the great things about this platform are, simply, the short bursts of information. It fits my brain to encapsulate a phrase or a joke or a comment in a couple of hundred characters. It’s the way I think. At least, it’s the way I think now. But the downside of Twitter is context. A comment shoved into 140 characters is not designed to bring that. It’s designed for a specific purpose. A joke. A prayer. A fact.
There are famed Twitter users who don’t seem to get “the deal” of Twitter and try to invoke policy or change large swaths of things through a single Tweet. The most famous of which, currently, is Elon Musk. Elon is a pretty interesting character. I’ll give you that. One part Ben Franklin. One part Donald Trump. One part Seth Rogen. Musk has famously raised and lost millions of dollars with a single tweet about his favorite cryptocurrency “DogeCoin.” (Stay with me here, folks, this is going somewhere.)
DogeCoin was created as a goof but Musk took a shine to it and decided to promote it. People invested. Musk tweeted about it more. More people invested. Did they spend time to look and see anything about it? Not really. But Musk likes it, and he made Teslas, so it must be valid. And then, with a single tweet, DogeCoin could lose half its value.
Recently Musk has taken a shine to owning Twitter itself. Twitter’s stock skyrocketed. Then, as the details became less likely, Twitter’s stock fell again. He’s shown the same pattern with Twitter stock, Tesla stock, cryptocurrencies, and even tweets about the government. Each time, people hang on every word of tweets from Elon Musk. So far, he’s been a paper tiger.
As a Twitter user for over a decade, we have an “old” saying on Twitter – “just tweet through it.” Often when public figures find themselves in a problem or a scandal, they just put their head down and keep Tweeting the same nonsense – doubling down, if you will. Elon will keep tweeting through it, because he’s as addicted to Twitter as I am.
I can say, however, that I’m not falling for any more of his games. Rule number one of Twitter has always facetiously been “don’t tweet.” And that rule trumps rule number two “always tweet.” Stick to rule number one, Elon.
(Bend the Twitter rules with Chris Kamler, who you’ll find performing there as the infamous @TheFakeNed)
