“Toxic Twitter” has become a cliché, with the social-media platform blamed for everything from President Trump’s election to terror attacks. But if you can slog through real life, you can master a little blue app.
The new conventional wisdom is that Twitter is one of those things that seems really cool at first but then turns out to be not so great: cigarettes, asbestos, laudanum.
But there are also plenty of inventions that are hard to figure out, but turn out to be pretty good, usually: fire, unpasteurized cheese, the stock market. What if Twitter, if not quite as revolutionary as unpasteurized cheese, falls in this latter category? Here are my lessons from 10 years of tweeting, if anyone finds them useful.
I started in the fall of 2009. I didn’t want to tweet. I set up an account because one of my p.r. bosses told me I should. But I didn’t see the point of it.
I started tweeting in earnest during the election of Mayor Bill de Blasio. In a 2013 primary debate, the soon-to-be-mayor said something dumb about reopening Times Square to car traffic. It wasn’t worth writing an article about, but it was hard to ignore, so what to do? I tweeted it — and it got attention.
Why tweet? Well, why do anything that involves human interaction? Because it works.
To tweet on a local level — that is, mostly on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, city economic policy, traffic and the always-fertile if less intellectually rarefied category of Dumb Things the Mayor Does — is to command the attention of the local press corps, City Council members and staffers, City Hall and city agency staffers, municipal-finance investors and plenty of “regular people” with a keen interest in New York City and plenty of ideas.
I may write an article about the new MTA contract and hear from different transit-union members about what they think of the contract, and why they think I’m wrong. And why — sometimes — they think I’m right.
I may write about why police shouldn’t park illegally in front of police stations and hear from police officers about how exhausting their job is. I may write about jail reform and get a tip from someone who knows to look into how many people the city is hiring to enact the reform.
Can Twitter be stressful? Sure. But no more stressful than having to come up with ideas for newspaper columns, having to figure out who might be willing to talk for a magazine article, having to network with people at a party without saying too many stupid things.
I might give up Twitter if I were about to go live on a deserted island and not care about New York City anymore.
That doesn’t seem to be happening soon, so I try to follow some principles, learned the hard way:
First, stay away, most of the time, from national politics. You aren’t going to convince anyone to vote for Trump or against him.
Second, don’t just block people who disagree with you. I’ve learned a lot from people I don’t agree with — from those who don’t like the idea of congestion pricing because they live far away from transit but still need to get into Manhattan, to others who are against any enforcement of farebeating because they think it is irredeemably racially biased.
I may not change my mind, but I have more empathy for other points of view. Before blocking someone, meaning you can’t see their tweets, ask yourself if they’re saying something outrageous — or if you’re just uncomfortable because they’re saying something you don’t often hear.
Third, don’t argue with people for more than one (OK, two) rounds back and forth. Say your piece and move on.
Fourth, don’t insult people and do block the people who insult you. There is no point in interacting with people who don’t like you or whom you don’t like.
Lastly, don’t spend all day on Twitter. Making and responding to a few tweets a day should be sufficient. You wouldn’t rearrange your day to argue in the checkout line about whether we should build more housing. Leave your phone at home when going food shopping or to the movies.
Twitter isn’t different from the rest of life: Try to be nice. Don’t take it too seriously. Easy, right? Like fire.
This piece originally appeared at the New York Post
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in New York Post