A friend once texted me about my tweeting. “Your tweets worry me,” she said. “I want to give you a hug.” Reading this, I remember feeling a strange mix of consolation and embarrassment. I was flattered by her concern but mortified at its cause.
Of course, tweeting is an attention-seeking behavior; we’re kidding ourselves if we profess otherwise.
At the time, I was driving over an unpaved stretch of emotions with a busted GPS, and any confessional song lyric, confessional poem stanza or confessional celebrity quote I could pack into 140 characters felt like a flare I had to launch into the Twittersphere.
I don’t think I was asking for help nor do I buy that tweeting my addled feelings was merely a release of self-expression–Moleskine and Bic provide a perfectly good market for that. But journaling is by nature solitary; it doesn’t offer the thrill of exposing one’s emotions to others. Spewing my anger and sadness into the feeds of my modest list of followers felt cathartic; hearing about it later, not so much.
We’re used to hearing that social media is a performative space where we can showcase our wittiest one-liners, the better sides of our faces and our most tastefully filtered vacation photos. We hope, with these happy, successful avatars, to inspire a harmless envy in our friends and a darker, more potent variety in our enemies.
Still, it would seem that many of us, by venting and wallowing in a public forum, are refusing to join the party.
Are we simply lacking in pageant skills?
It can’t be that we’re any less vain. A carefully doctored selfie and a whiny status are merely two different tactics for getting the same fix of attention. Ultimately, I think we want the impossible public-private compromise social media seems to offer: where everyone notices you, but no one has to really know you.
As a rule, the less I’m tweeting and posting, the busier and happier I am living. This fact became apparent recently as I cleaned out my backlog of embarrassing tweets and posts. They didn’t make me feel any better at the time, and they certainly weren’t doing me any favors haunting my timeline.
I’m convinced now that social media is an awful place to work through spiritual demons. It alienates where it presumes to connect; it prevents any real kind of vulnerability.
When we pretend to expose our weaknesses to an online audience, we tend to do so from inside a trench coat of indirectness and defensive humor. But our emotional upheavals are real. They deserve to be examined in a kinder, more honest light than the one offered by a screen.
Charles McCrory is a junior English major from Florence.
