My opinions have to go somewhere
A good friend once told me that “the only people that I know who have a Twitter are Donald Trump, Nihilist Arby’s and you.” Though I’m flattered to be associated with such an elite group of accounts, I have to argue that my Twitter has a little more to offer than that of a talking orange and a cynical sandwich.
A lot of people think Twitter is a dying form of communication, and they may be right in some ways. You can’t effectively communicate all aspects of your day in 140 characters, for instance. However, nobody really cares about all aspects of your day. So in that sense, Twitter censors you in a way that your cowardly friends simply can’t.
Twitter’s character limit makes it so that every story you tell has to be concise and captivating — if not a completely random string of words.
I’d also argue Twitter is alive and thriving because of the way it lets people max out their use of the First Amendment. On no other website would I be able to say exactly what I’m thinking without being judged. For example, I recently spilled an entire tub of ranch dressing in my backpack. Naturally, I went to Twitter, because I will die if I don’t tell someone about literally everything that happens to me throughout the day.
If you think Facebook is the kind of place you can talk about spilling ranch dressing in your backpack and still get a positive response, you are mistaken. Only on Twitter can my ranch-filled despair feel like an accomplishment.
Twitter is also the superior form of social media because it keeps me so much more politically informed than Facebook or Snapchat. Without Twitter, I would have no idea that White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer has a longstanding feud with the iconic American brand Dippin’ Dots. These are the kinds of things that I need to know.
So, from all of this very convincing and unbiased evidence, you can see that Twitter is truly one of the great garbage cans of the Internet — a place where opinions are just waiting to be dumped. But it’s my garbage can, and I care for it so deeply.
Written by: Lara Loptman — lrloptman@ucdavis.edu Twitter: @lllawra
