Dear Friends,
I cancelled my Twitter account Tuesday morning. A forgotten auto-feed might re-activate it temporarily, but rest assured it is down for good.
I had thought of this many times over the last year, and increasingly in 2013. On Tuesday I simply found a moment of clarity in which to do so. I am very pleased with my decision, as it's already brought me a great deal of peace of mind and given me back an average of two hours a day to do whatever I want with.
I thoroughly enjoyed having a well-read account on Twitter. However, the debate on the Greek twittersphere has long moved away from facts and figures, which I know and love. I thought at first that it had moved on to politics, which I was still happy to debate. But it's not quite that.
Over the last two years, the Greek twittersphere increasingly became more enraged, less spontaneous, and more self-referential. It's now packed to the gills with party-affiliated propagandists, nihilist trolls, and people on the lookout for ideological enemies. Most importantly, it is a closed system, drunk with its own heady mixture of adoration and hate, in which pundits fail to realise how unrepresentative they are of society at large, and yet pretend to speak for the people, or common sense, or something or other that they don't.
Worse still, I don't think my own behaviour on the platform was miles above the level of the aforementioned. I had an advantage over a few of them in that I was not mentally ill or on someone's payroll, but like many users, I sometimes went in to pick fights, sometimes revelled in aphorisms, and often preferred a loud round of applause to a meaningful contribution.
Maybe Greek twitterers will get their civil war in the end, but I want nothing to do with it. It's just not a medium that can help promote the generation of ideas, or reconciliation of any kind.
It also took up a lot of the time I could have spent blogging - the instant gratification of retweets and reactions can motivate you more than the slow buildup of an appreciative audience. In this regard I let my natural audience down - the quality and quantity of posts suffered and it's not hard to prove this. I apologise to early and loyal followers of the blog who must have at some point thought I'd picked another audience over them. They were right, too.
Privately, I also needed to end this constant drain on my own time and attention span. I joined as a young professional with no commitments and tons of time to waste. I am hardly in the same place right now and to maintain this level of activity for the sake of my own vanity would be plain stupid.
As a parting gift, I downloaded from Twitter my entire history of Tweets. You can download it, unedited, from here.
Stay tuned for proper posts without further introspection.
I cancelled my Twitter account Tuesday morning. A forgotten auto-feed might re-activate it temporarily, but rest assured it is down for good.
I had thought of this many times over the last year, and increasingly in 2013. On Tuesday I simply found a moment of clarity in which to do so. I am very pleased with my decision, as it's already brought me a great deal of peace of mind and given me back an average of two hours a day to do whatever I want with.
I thoroughly enjoyed having a well-read account on Twitter. However, the debate on the Greek twittersphere has long moved away from facts and figures, which I know and love. I thought at first that it had moved on to politics, which I was still happy to debate. But it's not quite that.
Over the last two years, the Greek twittersphere increasingly became more enraged, less spontaneous, and more self-referential. It's now packed to the gills with party-affiliated propagandists, nihilist trolls, and people on the lookout for ideological enemies. Most importantly, it is a closed system, drunk with its own heady mixture of adoration and hate, in which pundits fail to realise how unrepresentative they are of society at large, and yet pretend to speak for the people, or common sense, or something or other that they don't.
Worse still, I don't think my own behaviour on the platform was miles above the level of the aforementioned. I had an advantage over a few of them in that I was not mentally ill or on someone's payroll, but like many users, I sometimes went in to pick fights, sometimes revelled in aphorisms, and often preferred a loud round of applause to a meaningful contribution.
Maybe Greek twitterers will get their civil war in the end, but I want nothing to do with it. It's just not a medium that can help promote the generation of ideas, or reconciliation of any kind.
It also took up a lot of the time I could have spent blogging - the instant gratification of retweets and reactions can motivate you more than the slow buildup of an appreciative audience. In this regard I let my natural audience down - the quality and quantity of posts suffered and it's not hard to prove this. I apologise to early and loyal followers of the blog who must have at some point thought I'd picked another audience over them. They were right, too.
Privately, I also needed to end this constant drain on my own time and attention span. I joined as a young professional with no commitments and tons of time to waste. I am hardly in the same place right now and to maintain this level of activity for the sake of my own vanity would be plain stupid.
As a parting gift, I downloaded from Twitter my entire history of Tweets. You can download it, unedited, from here.
Stay tuned for proper posts without further introspection.
Καλή συνέχεια φιλε, μπροστα σε Κρουγκμανς εντός και εκτος συνόρων ήσουν αψογος. Ελιπζω να συνεχισεις να γραφεις σε χαλαρους ρυθμους
ReplyDeleteΣε κατανοώ απόλυτα. Προσωπικά, έχω προσπαθήσει να αντιμετωπίσω τα ίδια προβλήματα κάνοντας λιγότερο "φιλικό" το twitter feed μου για τους περισσότερους, ξεκαθαρίζοντας ποιους ακολουθώ με κριτήριο αν μου προσφέρουν ή με βάζουν σε διαδρομές που θα ήθελα να αποφύγω και αποφεύγοντας να μπλεχτώ στις συνηθισμένες διαμάχες ακόμη και αν με κάνουν mention.
ReplyDeleteΚαλή συνέχεια!
As somebody who just now found your site, may I ask you to reconsider? For me, twitter is the new RSS mechanism. Less reliable for sites that don't post multiple times per day, of course, but if your twitter feed were merely announcements of new blog entries, that could be useful despite the chaff that you see all around you.
ReplyDeleteNo need for apologies or explanations my friend, anyone who's waded through the abject provincialism of twitter.gr commiserates to the fullest extent imaginable.
ReplyDeleteGood luck,
d3lta aka Sheikyerbutti
Speaking as a member of the self-righteous nihilistic partially greek twitterverse, I'm going to miss seeing some of your activity. As a human being with spectacular attention and time management flaws, good on you for stepping away from another electronic k-hole. I'll finish this note by noting that we still haven't gone for that shisha, have we? Kali synexia man,
ReplyDelete-dimmu
I'm easy to find on FB. Message me and we'll plan.
DeleteDidn't realize you left twitter. Felt something was missing as I just got after leaving it for a year - overwhelmed by repetitiveness of it all.
DeleteOk I did cheat a bit with fictional Norwegian avatar until I got bored of google -translating Norwegian
But your (STOP FUNDING FASCISM! (BY AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE) had an impact.
Actually the more effective you are, the more some elements of twitter-sphere will try and wear your down
@albertjohn