Who Are You on Here
Someone I followed ran over a hedgehog on her way somewhere and the whole thing unfolded publicly in real time—the fact of it, the grief, the logistics, the philosophical question of whether she could still make it to a friend’s birthday party under these emotional conditions, what she’d order at Starbucks to recover. Her followers weighed in. Hot cocoa versus a latte. By the time the thread died she’d probably processed more of it through Twitter than through her own head.
Twitter gets used in as many ways as there are people using it. Some treat the character limit like a form worth respecting, pressing small, precise sentences out of the constraint. Others post only links, only signal, filtering themselves down into a clean information stream. And then there’s the enormous middle ground where people broadcast whatever—what they saw on the walk to the station, what they lost and found on the way to the swimming pool. Water wings and condoms. Someone will care.
This journal had a Twitter account I ran, and for a long time I used it the way I used everything else—unfiltered, personal, occasionally deep in public conversations about subjects nobody who followed the account had signed up for. Then at some point the account started to feel like a thing that had to represent something rather than a place to just exist. And once that switch flips, you start editing before you’ve had the thought. You stop posting about pizza toppings and start managing a presence.
The question of whether there’s a right way to use any of this is genuinely unanswerable, which hasn’t stopped endless people from appointing themselves experts in a microcosm whose effective radius reaches no further than their own notification feed. A company account is different from a personal one, a magazine feed is different from a private voice—and even within each category there’s no consensus, just different bets on what anyone else wants to read.
Probably the honest answer is: stay interesting and don’t think too hard about the architecture of it. The woman with the hedgehog was interesting. The grief and the Starbucks order and the birthday party were interesting, in the specific way that the texture of a stranger’s actual life is always briefly interesting. That’s not nothing. As long as the voice stays alive—genuinely, not strategically—the rest tends to work itself out.