Twitter, the Intimacy Machine
Metadata
Highlights
- The frequency of context-destruction is no accident. Twitter rewards high-context speech, and then gives us the perfect tool to decontextualize that speech. Twitter is designed to invite our vulnerability, and then punish it.
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All jokes require that the joke-teller and audience share some background knowledge. And that background knowledge needs to be unstated for the joke to work.
- When we laugh together, that is a very special occasion. It is already noteworthy that we laugh at all, at anything, and that we laugh all alone. That we do it together is the satisfaction of a deep human longing, the realization of a desperate hope. It is the hope that we are enough like one another to sense one another, to be able to live together.
- Twitter, through its brevity, draws out of us acts of vulnerability and intimacy. It forces us to depend on shared background context in order to create richly meaningful tweets.
- The heroin-hit joy of connections, on Twitter, depends directly on our having made ourselves actively vulnerable, on our having deliberately flirted with the possibility of misunderstanding.