What we tweet about when we tweet about the death of Twitter

When Buzzfeed reported Twitter’s alleged shift from a reverse-chronological timeline to a more algorithmic one similar to Facebook’s, I was one of the many howling voices from which the trending hashtag #RIPTwitter was built. It was a protest hashtag that did not care for any of Twitter’s excuses, like its falling stock price, its departing top executives, its need to make a major change to address its slowing growth. They needed to attract new users, the report said, and felt that a more algorithmic timeline showing tweets based on one’s observed preferences (determined from one’s “likes” and retweets) in place of its existing raw, reverse-chronological timeline was the way to do so. This move also seemed like an effective way for Twitter to lose some loyal users. Real-time updates and interactions are the whole point to Twitter, many of us howled. If we wanted something like Facebook, we’ll just go to Facebook, we complained. This is the end of Twitter, we cried.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey heard those cries loud and clear and went on Twitter (of course) to set the record straight. “We never planned to reorder timelines,” he tweeted. “I *love* real-time. We love the live stream. It’s us.” As tech website The Verge reported last week, the algorithmic timeline would not replace the existing one, but would merely serve as an add-on feature. Once you log on, you’ll instantly be greeted by an algorithmic timeline showing the “important” tweets you missed when you were logged off. But as soon as you pull it down, your timeline goes back to good ol’ reverse-chronology. In other words, if you don’t like an algorithmic timeline, you don’t have to look at it. It’s just there for whoever’s interested.

Now that I’ve taken a breath, I’ll admit that it does sound interesting. I already like the “While you were away” feature, the short out-of-sequence highlight strip to which The Verge compares the new algorithmic timeline, but I wish it went longer than just a few handful of tweets. Well, the new algorithmic timeline is basically an expanded version of this, which is good news. It’s now easier to see all the important tweets I missed while I was asleep or offline and I can still experience real-time Twitter any time I want. This new change hasn’t happened yet as of this writing, but by the time it’s implemented, I may be totally hooked on the same algorithmic Twitter I absolutely hated last weekend.

Times Of Crises

It is often said that one’s true self is revealed in times of crises and last week’s Twitter panic revealed something about me that I guess is common to a lot of people. It seems I have a paradoxical relationship with technology. While technology is associated with concepts like advancement and progressiveness, my relationship with it is still defined by conservatism. I like technology but I’m uncomfortable with its radicalism. I appreciate music streaming but long for the days of physical music. I like the idea of downloadable TV shows, but I miss the pleasant surprises of channel surfing. I like Twitter but only as long as it stays the same.

People like me who protested the alleged change last week did so because we value Twitter’s reverse chronology as though it were one of nature’s immutable facts, like the way ultra-conservatives oppose same-sex marriage by invoking the “natural” state of heterosexual relations. This was a strange reaction in retrospect, especially considering that we didn’t even know, 10 years ago, that we needed Twitter in the first place. When Twitter launched in 2006, no one knew what to make of it. It was weird and it seemed unnecessary; tweeting was akin to texting into an unknown void. So users made up the rules as they went along, eventually creating a language and a sensibility, even stumbling into sui generis inventions like live-tweeting, fake bots, and parody accounts.

We imagine our relationship with technology as something external, as though our humanity and the technologies we develop were separate parts of the same machine. But I think we take for granted how our being inventive is embedded deep in our being human. There is no greater proof of this than the Internet, which is as close to a technological simulacrum of our souls as there’s ever been. Much has been said and written about how much the Internet has changed us, but not enough attention is given to how much we have changed the Internet. What was initially intended for military use is now completely unrecognizable from its original purpose — no one in the 1960s imagined that there would be such things as social media or streaming music, let alone a world that would be needing them. Technology’s function always changes because we never stay the same.

A Certain Charm

The charm behind Twitter’s reverse chronology was never innate — we supplied it. So I suppose it’s no stretch to think that, after all the kicking and screaming, we’ll still end up putting our DNA on whatever changes Twitter makes. We can’t say exactly how this will happen, only that it will surely happen. It always does. We can never predict how technology will change our lives because it is inevitably subject to human contamination. Like trends, movements, and conventions, technology is just another aspect of human life that is eternally fluid.

We rebel against predictive algorithms because we claim to be unpredictable. They run counter to our romantic notion of being complex, unquantifiable beings. But the reason we use for rebelling against technological change is the same reason why we should never fear it. No algorithm, however advanced or seemingly sentient, can ever capture our quirks and imperfections, much less override them. We devour technology, not the other way around. So bring it on, Twitter. Give us your algorithmic timelines, your 10,000-word limit, your acts of desperation disguised as innovation. We will never leave you for you’re too full of ourselves.

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Tweet the author @colonialmental.