Into the Chirping Void

Everyone I knew seemed to be on Twitter and I couldn’t work out what to do with it. The interface wasn’t complicated—the problem was that the whole thing demanded a specific relationship with the sound of your own voice that I hadn’t developed yet. You were supposed to just say things, into the feed, in public, in under 140 characters, and then other people would say things back or they wouldn’t. That was Twitter. It took longer than I’d like to admit before any of that started feeling natural rather than like shouting into a very specific, text-based void that was somehow also shouting back.