Twitter and the Confusion of Medium and Message

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When it became clear that the market for music was shifting to digital downloads and away from physical media, a lot of people got upset. Something similar happened when ebooks took off, and a critical mass of people turned to reading novels on a Kindle instead of buying them in bound paper.

This upsetness, while not limited to, was definitely concentrated among the musicians and authors producing music and novels. They had built not just their careers, but the self-identities, around being people who record music or write novels, and “music” and “novels” meant not just sounds and words, but sounds and words embedded in certain mediums. Their anger, then, was in large part about a perceived devaluing of their work because the market, while still very much interest in music and novels, was less interested in music and novels in the form these artists believed necessary to them.

Put another way, the belief was that, if you value music or if you value novels, then you will want to own music on vinyl or novels in paper. Therefore, if you prefer music as a digital file or novels as ebooks, then you don’t actually or fully value music or novels.

The same dynamic is at play in the discourse about users fleeing Twitter/X for Bluesky and Threads. It doesn’t explain all of the complaints about declining audiences and echo chambers, but it’s a background—and, I suspect, largely unconscious—driver of the concern that leaving Twitter represents a failure of civic virtue.

Twitter has been around for almost two decades. In internet years, that’s forever, and it’s long enough that, for a lot of journalists, Twitter has been there for their entire careers. (I’m using “journalist” as a broad placeholder that includes outright journalists, but also bloggers, public intellectuals, and the wider formal and informal commentariat.) And, while publications come and go, Twitter has been the one constant “outlet.” (This perception is made stronger by the weird structure of social media that makes it feel more representative of, well, everything than it in fact is.)

Yes, you can publish articles in your newspaper, or write essays for your newsletter, but for heavy Twitter users, especially those who’ve been on it for years, a pretty good chunk of “what it means to do journalism” or “what it means to provide commentary” simply is “posting on Twitter”—and in a way analogous to “what it means to make music” being “releasing records” or “what it means to write novels” being “having your name on a hardcover book.” Twitter isn’t just where they produce, but it’s what they produce. Twitter isn’t the medium for the message. It is, in a meaningful sense, the message itself.

With that in mind, think about what it looks like to have Twitter collapse. The writing was on the wall as soon as Musk took over. The renamed X would never be a free speech platform supporting the singular public square, because Musk isn’t a free speech guy. He’s a far-right guy, an extremist and conspiracy theorist and warrior against any values that don’t align with his white nationalist worldview. For a while, though, you could reasonably pretend others. You really can’t anymore and, after the election, and Musk’s role not just in getting Trump elected but in the incoming administration, plenty of people who hadn’t already had enough decided now they had. Many decamped to Threads, but the kind of journalism, public intellectuals, and academic circles relevant here went instead to Bluesky. (I deleted my Twitter account not long after Musk bought the platform, and have split my time between Threads and Bluesky, but lately have been much more active on the latter.)

First, you’ve seen your audience drop away. This is upsetting because if you’re a writer, having an audience for your writing matters. You want people paying attention to what you have to say, and fewer people are on Twitter paying attention—and fewer are still there care much about journalism and ideas. Second, your friends are leaving, and social media is, well, social. I miss the people I left behind on Twitter. And I’m more active on Bluesky than Threads because Bluesky’s where most of my friends have ended up. Third, though, you don’t want to see Twitter devalued, because you’ve come to view the value of what you do, the value of your work, as bound up in Twitter’s value. So when you or I leave Twitter, it’s not just that we’re devaluing the platform. We’re devaluing the work and careers of the people who remain.

From this perspective, if you or I value the work these journalists do, we’ll read it and engage with it. That’s how we show we care. And if Twitter is the work, then caring about it means sticking around on Twitter. Bluesky is great for journalism. In fact, as of now, it’s better than Twitter, because Bluesky doesn’t suppress links, and so good journalism get not just more engagement on Bluesky, but more traffic, too. But pointing to numbers (traffic, active users, bots, etc.) isn’t the same as changing the feels.

Changing the feels will take time. And it will take a realization that, yes, Twitter was profoundly important, for almost 20 years, to journalism. But just as a single newspaper going under doesn’t mean journalism’s dead, because journalism isn’t confined to a single outlet, so too Twitter going under is just one medium giving way to another. The message is what matters, and the message can better thrive elsewhere.

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