3 ms·

>Later on I unfollowed 90% accounts and stuck to those accounts which strictly tweets only about programming, math, history and other such stuffs in robotic man

>Later on I unfollowed 90% accounts and stuck to those accounts which strictly tweets only about programming, math, history and other such stuffs in robotic manner (I.e. without any hidden agenda or connotations). One thing I noticed in my own time on Twitter was that this is easier said than done. It's very difficult to accurately gauge whether something is 'without any hidden connotations'. I'm not a historian or a biologist or a sociologist. I'm not a scholar of constitutional law. There may not be an agenda there, perhaps not even an agenda consciously realised by the author, but it's hard to accept the idea that we can escape 'connotations'. Very much like how the best propaganda appears as fact, or how ideology must first present itself as non-ideological, this gets extremely tricky when it comes to something like history, or even biology. Similarly, the mere presence of a plurality of ideas is insufficient to overcome this. I suspect that many who would follow your advice will find themselves still trapped in very similar bubbles of ideology, but this time without the knowledge that it really is ideology. This is a more insidious kind of politicisation, because it primes the user to put down their critical guard in the fact of a lack of 'hidden agenda or connotations'.

vladvasiliu 6y ago
While your points are good, I don't think that's an issue for OP. From what I understand he wants to avoid the "professionally outraged", not necessarily to scrub his feed of anything remotely "ideologically-charged". I don't often go on Twitter anymore, but from what I saw and from what other people report, there seem to be some "wars" going on where people are just shouting random stuff at each other without even so much as attempting to have an actual debate. I can see how following such exchanges can feel tiring and a waste of time. However, most tweets I used to see from people I follow are mostly matter of fact and technology-related. Of course, they sometime stray from strictly IT talk to more personal things. For example there's a woman who would sometimes tweet about her daughter / being a mom. Could this possibly be a vehicle of some sort of ideology, such as feminism / women in tech / whatever? Sure. But it only comes in once in a while, I can jump over it, and it has never devolved in any kind of screaming match.
CaptArmchair 6y ago
Historians are taught to be aware of their own biases and attributing value in their research / observations of the past. Having said that, I think it's far more interesting to look at the medium itself. Marshall McLuhan, after all, did say "the medium is the message" or "the medium is the massage". Twitter was first conceived as a micro-blogging service. You simply gave status updates about what was going on in your life, or a part of your life, or whatever. Then @ replies, # tags and re-tweets were introduced. Re-tweets weren't even invented by Twitter, it was something users started to do, and then Twitter implemented it as a button: https://www.annehelmond.nl/2013/01/19/on-retweet-analysis-and-a-short-history-of-retweets/ https://www.annehelmond.nl/2013/01/19/on-retweet-analysis-an... The same is true for the # tag which was introduced by early user @chrismessina. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Messina_(open-source_advocate) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Messina_(open-source_adv... Then there's the history of Twitter itself which is mired in strife between the original founders, and changing different strategic visions as things suddenly - and rather unexpectedly - took off, thanks to the mobile revolution. Twitter is, after all a business, and not a very successful one at at that: it only turned it first annual profit in... 2018. Why this backdrop? Because if you use Twitter, the feed of tweets you see is inherently distorted by this historic context. Twitter is used as channel for direct conversation between individuals... but it was originally never intended to become that. Twitter is used for marketing purposes to wide audiences... but it was never originally intended to be that. The same is true with most social media. They were conceived by a few founders on a very limited premise - which was indeed rooted in their own personal context of affluence - and everything else became improvisation along the way as users took the concept and then started using those tools in novel, unexpected ways. None that implies that these platforms don't carry value, are unusable or a lost cause. And neither does it excuse how the strategies and the visions of the past 15 years didn't result in affordances that curb discrimination, polarization and intolerance, but sometimes even reinforced them. What this means to your average user, then, is that social media present a particular biased representation of reality; just as much as you would find in mainstream media. It's up to the user/reader then to be critical and understand that these continuous feeds of disparate thoughts are only presenting you with so much truth about the world. Historians are taught that true objective historiography doesn't really exist and a pure fact based overview of history isn't informative. The interpretative nature of historiography doesn't make history any less valuable. As the famous French historian Marc Bloch wrote: "The ABC of our profession is to avoid these large abstract terms in order to try to discover behind them the only concrete realities, which are human beings." Marc Bloch was the founder of the Annales School together with other famous historians: their work informed contemporary historiography up until this day. Beyond academics, Bloch saw active combat in World War I, joined the resistance in World War II and was arrested and executed 3 weeks after D-Day. He was also Jewish. Context matters, and Bloch was acutely aware that he wasn't just writing history, he was also very much being part of it's making. In the same vain, in actively using Twitter, users are shaping it and forming it's history.

vladvasiliu 6y ago

While your points are good, I don't think that's an issue for OP. From what I understand he wants to avoid the "professionally outraged", not necessarily to scrub his feed of anything remotely "ideologically-charged". I don't often go on Twitter anymore, but from what I saw and from what other people report, there seem to be some "wars" going on where people are just shouting random stuff at each other without even so much as attempting to have an actual debate. I can see how following such exchanges can feel tiring and a waste of time. However, most tweets I used to see from people I follow are mostly matter of fact and technology-related. Of course, they sometime stray from strictly IT talk to more personal things. For example there's a woman who would sometimes tweet about her daughter / being a mom. Could this possibly be a vehicle of some sort of ideology, such as feminism / women in tech / whatever? Sure. But it only comes in once in a while, I can jump over it, and it has never devolved in any kind of screaming match.

CaptArmchair 6y ago

Historians are taught to be aware of their own biases and attributing value in their research / observations of the past. Having said that, I think it's far more interesting to look at the medium itself. Marshall McLuhan, after all, did say "the medium is the message" or "the medium is the massage". Twitter was first conceived as a micro-blogging service. You simply gave status updates about what was going on in your life, or a part of your life, or whatever. Then @ replies, # tags and re-tweets were introduced. Re-tweets weren't even invented by Twitter, it was something users started to do, and then Twitter implemented it as a button: https://www.annehelmond.nl/2013/01/19/on-retweet-analysis-and-a-short-history-of-retweets/ https://www.annehelmond.nl/2013/01/19/on-retweet-analysis-an... The same is true for the # tag which was introduced by early user @chrismessina. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Messina_(open-source_advocate) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Messina_(open-source_adv... Then there's the history of Twitter itself which is mired in strife between the original founders, and changing different strategic visions as things suddenly - and rather unexpectedly - took off, thanks to the mobile revolution. Twitter is, after all a business, and not a very successful one at at that: it only turned it first annual profit in... 2018. Why this backdrop? Because if you use Twitter, the feed of tweets you see is inherently distorted by this historic context. Twitter is used as channel for direct conversation between individuals... but it was originally never intended to become that. Twitter is used for marketing purposes to wide audiences... but it was never originally intended to be that. The same is true with most social media. They were conceived by a few founders on a very limited premise - which was indeed rooted in their own personal context of affluence - and everything else became improvisation along the way as users took the concept and then started using those tools in novel, unexpected ways. None that implies that these platforms don't carry value, are unusable or a lost cause. And neither does it excuse how the strategies and the visions of the past 15 years didn't result in affordances that curb discrimination, polarization and intolerance, but sometimes even reinforced them. What this means to your average user, then, is that social media present a particular biased representation of reality; just as much as you would find in mainstream media. It's up to the user/reader then to be critical and understand that these continuous feeds of disparate thoughts are only presenting you with so much truth about the world. Historians are taught that true objective historiography doesn't really exist and a pure fact based overview of history isn't informative. The interpretative nature of historiography doesn't make history any less valuable. As the famous French historian Marc Bloch wrote: "The ABC of our profession is to avoid these large abstract terms in order to try to discover behind them the only concrete realities, which are human beings." Marc Bloch was the founder of the Annales School together with other famous historians: their work informed contemporary historiography up until this day. Beyond academics, Bloch saw active combat in World War I, joined the resistance in World War II and was arrested and executed 3 weeks after D-Day. He was also Jewish. Context matters, and Bloch was acutely aware that he wasn't just writing history, he was also very much being part of it's making. In the same vain, in actively using Twitter, users are shaping it and forming it's history.