Shoot (Week 3)

Right before I decided to finally get down to business working on this assignment, I had been steadily sinking into a Twitter black hole of Tomi Lahren and Piers Morgan followers. There are no other living celebrity/social media personalities who make me want to wring my body into an all-but-obliterated pile of dust more than Tomi Lahren and Piers Morgan. This I know about myself, so allowing my addicted fingers to type their names into the search bar and scroll through their latest strings of idiocy is generally what some would consider an act of pure masochism; not only does it lead to such willfully ignorant imbecility as Ms. Lahren equating the email scandals of a former presidential candidate with the rising evidence of real-time foreign interference in our democratic elections, it leads to hundreds of thousands of equally willfully ignorant imbecilic followers with equally strong opinions, and with followers of their own. 

I should probably just block these accounts, as I have with the president's, to spare myself the agony of falling into these nonsensical, public political rabbit holes with the original poster and their leagues of admirers, but I haven't yet, for the same reason I haven't stopped reading the top comments on Facebook articles--as painful as they may be, there's something to be said for observing how people outside my mental intellectual sphere see the same things I'm seeing. 

Because I was entirely absorbed in my visceral hatred for these accounts and others like them, I decided to make that feeling the point of this assignment. I'm both eager and anxious to see how the history books will write about this era, twenty or thirty or fifty years from now, and to see how either totally shocked or utterly unsurprised future students will be to learn of the absurdly overinflated role of Twitter in these times. Twitter has become the social and political crux of the virtual world, much more so than other digital media and networking platforms, I believe, in no small part because it is the platform the president has chosen as his primary megaphone. 

Even before it became such a massive element of politics, Twitter was known as the platform most used as a no-pressure space for virtually any thought, possibly a draft of something later to be posted on Facebook or Instagram (the "old saying" goes, "No one is as happy as they seem on Instagram, or as sad as they seem on Twitter..."). Twitter is the go-to platform for our most careless, least thought-out thoughts--and it can also be an incredible way of reaching out and connecting to people. I've followed threads just in the last week of people in Texas whose phones were about to die, who still needed help, who sent one tweeted plea that got retweeted thousands and thousands of times, and ended up getting them saved. Twitter, more so than Instagram or Facebook, is frequently used to share iPhone footage direct from user to follower documenting personal experiences or observations of police brutality or other public demonstrations of injustice. Social media is amazing for its democratic qualities, but it's also a significant player in the ongoing debates around freedom of speech (whether hate speech is included in those constitutional protections, what constitutes hate speech in the first place) and public trust in mainstream and alternative news sources. 

Essentially: I go through brief phases when I would like to personally murder Twitter and all the inexcusably stupid things it has spawned, until I remember how much good is possible using the same tools (which, like video technology and others before it, has unsettling militant connotations). Worse yet, Twitter is the platform which reminds me, more than any others, just how many people there are who believe what they believe just as strongly and surely as I believe what I believe, and empathy and perspective are all mixed up with what is true. (I think of Facebook as "the original" platform used this way--which, by the truly young and hip, it no longer is--this is why the Facebook logo visually entraps the others.) The tagline is ripped from a Woodrow Wilson misquote when, in 1937,  unfounded suspicions arose that Wilson supported the KKK based on a claim that, after seeing Birth of a Nation, he stated, “It’s like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” The fact that this statement is "almost certainly apocryphal" (according to The New York Times) just lends itself all the more easily to the tragic, difficult reality of parsing through social media accounts in order to determine some piece of truth. 

Sasha Kohan