Note: For the sake of my own sanity, I refer to the app in question as “Twitter,” even though I am aware it is now called “X.” That’s an idiotic name (that could only be thought up by a person equally as such) and is partly why I deleted it, among other things …
It was a queer, isolated summer, the summer of the first pandemic, and I didn’t know what I was doing online.
I had a Twitter account for keeping up with the news of an apocalyptic world, an Instagram for aesthetically curated social activism slides from celebrities and a Snapchat for checking in on my friends, bored at home.
For the first couple months, I used my “finsta” heavily, if not obsessively. I wrote a haiku every day for over sixty days. The poems (I use that term very loosely) were usually accompanied by a photo dump of whatever had accumulated in my camera roll within the last twenty-four hours. Sorry to anyone that followed that account. Clearly, I was not coping well.
At some point, I got fed up with Instagram. I couldn’t bring myself to care about any of it — about the filtered lives of celebrities or people I barely knew in high school. It’s a little amusing, but I thought I was doing the very smart, very adult thing by cutting down my screen time and moving on. Now I know that what I really wanted was just distance from my old self, the one that existed within the borders of those three-by-three-inch squares. She looked happy and healthy, blissfully ignorant of what was to come. And I couldn’t really remember what that felt like anymore.
I knew I had to go cold turkey. Once I deleted the app from my phone, I felt the tiniest weight lift off my chest. A little detachment might be nice, and maybe I’d get to happy and healthy quicker now that I was unhindered by the time-sucking endless scrolls, image after image flashing by of people living their best lives. The best of Instagram is just regurgitated Tweets and TikToks, I told myself (Facebook is a cesspool where all of the above get dredged up months later). You’re not missing out. This was a good thing, I decided.
That was three years ago. I haven’t redownloaded it since.
Snapchat was similarly easy to wean off of. It’s still on my phone, but I use it rarely, if ever, and get a little perturbed when someone I meet in college asks for it instead of my number. It reeks of adolescence.
Twitter is wasmy last social media app standing. It’s funny, because in a technical sense, Twitter doesn’t really exist anymore. By way of the Ship of Theseus, the creator is gone, most of the staff that built the app was fired, and it goes by a new name — but the people, the users that wrote the content that made Twitter, Twitter — they’re (mostly) still there. So is it still Twitter?
My impulse says no. The app is glitchy, with new bugs and regulations every other week, the hierarchy of verified accounts and paid-premium users is a security nightmare and I get an ad precisely every five Tweets. Er — posts. I’m not sure what they’re calling them now.
But in spite of the fact that Twitter was clearly deteriorating, it was a lot more difficult to let go of than I anticipated. In my Bookmarks, I have the entire Eras Tour saved in a series of Tweets, articles I return to when I feel uninspired and videos that make me keel over laughing. Yet I knew deep down that these weren’t the real source of my hesitation. It feels kind of dumb to write out loud, but I didn’t want to lose touch, and especially not in the realm of the arts. It’s not like I consider myself to currently have my finger on the pulse of digital culture or anything (I leave that responsibility to other, much cooler writers), but it’s mind-numbingly easy to become dependent on a platform like Twitter for your daily dose of “news.” And by news I mean collective clamors of outrage and jokes about celebrity scandals and TV cancellations.
For better or worse, it’s what living in the digital age now feels like: a cacophonous context of conflating voices and opinions that indubitably influence the way I perceive art and media and the world around me. The experience is never strictly positive or negative, but a superficial part of me fears who I would become in the silence. That voice whispers, “Without it, would you still fit in?” like some paranoid, friendless tween. I thought I’d grown past these childish concerns. Instagram was in the trash, and my teenage self was lost somewhere in the ether along with it.
After deleting Twitter, I began to ponder other ways in which I could stay “up to date.” I could watch the evening news, but then I’d find out about things a week later, tinged by a Gen X perspective. I could watch “Good Morning America,” which keeps my dad surprisingly hip, but I don’t have cable. I could read magazines and newspapers, but I’m not sure if physical print is feasible or all that sustainable. I could do so digitally, but scouring the internet for articles from writers I like scattered across publications and paywalls feels easier said than done.
Though I personally root for the downfall of streaming services and the resurgence of physical media, a physical counterpart to social media feels unfathomable, and for good reason. With every alternative, there’s an inherent delay, and media moves at such a fast rate these days that platforms of the past simply cannot catch up. With Twitter, it feels as though everything you could possibly want to know about how people feel about a current event is right at your fingertips. I can’t tell if that’s an experience I actually want, or if it’s merely what I’ve grown used to.
Social media was only able to revolutionize the media game because it knew that being aware of trends and actively participating in them are two very different things. Its entire enterprise was founded on an endless stream of conversation that people desperately wanted to join in on, and literally constructed a fear of missing out on. Twitter works because it isn’t just a scrolling mass of headlines, it’s people’s reactions to them.
If I made an effort, I could certainly sustain awareness of new art, but keeping up with trends and the public consensus of said art? That’s a lot harder. As much as I like giving my personal input on things, part of what I love about arts criticism is the discourse itself — the longevity of it, the ongoing twists and turns it takes as it gets shaped and remolded in the face of popular culture. Twitter provided convenient access to the reception of a work in real time, from both fans and other writers. It felt like a network of microcelebrities that produced creative, engaging pieces of criticism for renowned publications and personal SubStacks, as well as funny Tweets. I’ll miss feeling a part of that conversation, in whatever small way I could.
I’ve had a good run with Twitter, truly. I’ve gotten into inadvertent arguments with ex-beloved childhood authors, and recieved notices from arts critics that made my life feel momentarily absurd. One time, I even caught the attention of some Lorde stan accounts from Brazil. To this day, I have never received more wholly positive feedback on a piece (and never again were more of the messages in Portuguese). But it’s time to let go. I know that a collapse of Twitter, or X, or whatever succeeds it, is imminent, but what will be left? A monstrous amalgamation of Instagram that wields “Reels” (TikTok), “Threads” (Twitter) and the rotting scraps of Facebook? No, thank you.
I remember reading a piece years ago about a journalist who traded in her iPhone for a purple Motorola flip phone she had used in the ’00s. She swore it changed her life for the better. She stayed in contact with friends and family via calls and texts and had no means of accessing social media. It brought her a sense of peace, she iterated, again and again. I wonder if she’s happy and healthy. If she’s living her best life. If I did the same as her, would I?
Technically, my Twitter account will still exist even after I remove the app from my phone. So does my Instagram. I could deactivate it permanently, but part of me doesn’t have the heart to erase that little memorial to my high school self. She looks happy and healthy, and for the most part, she really was.
The other day I dug up my old hot pink iPod Shuffle. It took a while to recharge, but it still works. Maybe that can be my purple Motorola. I don’t feel all that cleansed, but maybe it just hasn’t sunken in. I’ll get to happy and healthy at some point.
Daily Arts Writer Serena Irani can be reached at seirani@umich.edu.
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