“The trouble is that, with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe, the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to examine our assumptions, there are 20 rabble-rousers whose real motive is desire for power over others.”
Doris Lessing, Language and the Lunatic Fringe

As enthusiastic as I was about the wonders of Twitter when I was first introduced to it, I cannot hold claim to the same commitment as I did then. Having said that, I should add that aside from a few breaks, some short, others extending over months, I still tweet everyday, though the way I use my account has gone through a few transformations. From hangout space to journalism tool to vulgar self-promotion to preaching-to-the-choir-style activism to estranged lover and now, a place to find engaging opinion and interesting information.

In truth, it was always the latter and has consistently remained that.

Given where I am about to head with this piece, I should clarify that I have found wonderful people, made enduring relationships, and discovered fascinating thinking and reading material through this medium that since its entry into my life has stayed an essential part of it.

It could be that my relationship with Twitter has evolved with the medium itself as though we are characters in a real-time bildungsroman where the protagonist is this technology. Since in our high-speed digital age everything occurs in double time, our seven-year-old hero or anti-hero depending how you see it, would be at a prematurely arrived-at teenage stage.

Unfortunately, it has taken the more annoying adolescent traits of self-absorption and inflated self-importance rather than the endearing spirit of rebellion and individualism experienced at that age. In painful detail, one is watching its fifteen-year-old skin erupt in acne, pimples oozing pus – and some blood too.

Given the gravity of the consequences of a tweet, a story that breaks, swells and explodes on the medium, perhaps I should take it more seriously than that, but then, I think that is part of the problem. We seem to be taking Twitter far too seriously – not just that, we are taking ourselves on Twitter far too seriously. And when I who have always taken myself far too seriously should feel that way, well, then, I think we’re in trouble.

As problems go, there is the much talked about issue of the limitations of 140 characters and its resulting lack of nuance. The combination of the paltry word count and the awareness that you are in the glare of the global public domain nurtures the culture of snark – a word that sounds to me like a phlegmatic expulsion and describes the equally unpleasant combination of “snide” and “remark.”

To create impact, to be seen, heard, and to add on followers, there is the temptation to make a statement, coin a catch phrase, rely on shock value. Add to that the pace of the rapidly turning timeline and its pressure, the possibility of any kind of thoughtful response is all but annihilated. Just writing about it is making my head reel with anxiety, which is, incidentally, one of the reasons behind my absences from the Twitterverse as it is called.

As an a-side, I would like to say that the language associated with the medium reflects its self-delusion. Case in point, the ridiculous term, “Twitterverse.”

Contrary to what the tweeting community may want to believe, even at about 200 million users Twitter is not a universe, it is not even a speck. I understand that the word “universe” has evolved, but really, let’s have some perspective please.

For me the most troubling aspect of Twitter is the one that has loomed largest of late, and I am certainly not the first to comment on it – the emergence of the social media mob and the hysteria that accompanies it. Increasingly, I see individuals on Twitter amassing to become a collective authority that believes itself to be in the right while the other (with a differing opinion) is wrong; they traverse Twitter, witch-hunting in swarms, quickly resorting to name-calling and cruelty.

Of course, this absolute conviction of moral superiority and intolerance toward dissenting views is inherent to the psyche of a mob. But what is also intrinsic to this kind of pack mentality is conformity.

In that, I think it is no coincidence that Twitter is a platform created by Americans. For while Americans speak most emphatically on the importance of individualism, there are no people who have historically been more invested in conformity.

First made glaringly apparent in the 1950s when the US media perpetuated the single notion of the idyllic and morally elevated American “way of life” with its straight, white, middle-class, heteronormative family-oriented values, that concept is intact today. It is in the uniform of blue jeans, the rows of identical houses in tidy grids carving the suburbia, the staple SUV in the driveway and the evening ritual of television.

(On the American question, I read an intriguing piece the other day on a “sudden upsurge” of hysteria – caused by Facebook – in Salem of all places.)

Twitter is a microcosm of this ideal. Flocking us to eat the same fodder, it is the very structure of the application that feeds herd behaviour, and is continuously being modified to incorporate more such features. The hash (#) symbol for instance, allows you to signify an event, a topic, a keyword but also, more importantly an emotion (e.g., #feelingblue). Using a hashtag allows you to see and commune with others tagging the same word or phrase.

After one of my recent updates, I began to receive notification alerts each time a group of three or more users I follow would make a similar move. “@ABC, @XXX and @XYZ retweeted a tweet” flashed on my phone screen. My curiosity was piqued enough for me to see the tweet. It is true that this could be the app alerting me to news that is breaking – after all, most users rely on Twitter for the accumulation of information and news bulletins – but it also subversively serves the purpose of telling me that I should be retweeting that tweet.

There is a similar alert when three or more from my timeline follow someone. A gentle nudge from Twitter to follow the person everyone else is following and to be part of the horde.

As hordes go and grow, individual voices are either lost in the cacophony or merge into the same chant. The collective voice of Twitter is quick to condemn the mainstream media and constantly congratulates itself for being the greatest challenger of the electronic and print mediums without the recognition that any narrative in the collective is ultimately, mainstream.

They (the amorphous “they”) may perceive themselves to be challenging power, but the platform does not exist in a vacuum, power is just as present and pervasive as anywhere else.

It is in the politicians tweeting minute-by-minute accounts of their lives right down to their bowel movements; it is in their trolls. It is in the much more diabolical packaged-for-purchase bots that tweet the same message repeated at a speed that no human could replicate. Power is grinding the wheels behind the message propagated by the thousands of fake Twitter accounts masquerading as humans but are machines creating the illusion of mass opinion. And power is also present in the righteous outrage of individuals who think they are speaking for honour but are pushing an agenda unknown to them.

And as is the way of power, to refer to Lessing’s quote, within any popular movement or at the podium of a movement, there are always the rabble-rousers who are clawing their way up the carcasses of the individuals they destroy to gain the very same power they detest. Sadly, it is these voices so desperate to be heard that shriek the loudest and for that reason end up registering above the clamour.

Of late, when I go through my timeline, I find a new legion of self-appointed moral soldiers gleefully tearing apart a different person everyday. One day it was my friend, Tarun Tejpal and his daughters who found themselves reduced to a hashtag within a matter of hours, his life’s work destroyed, and a criminal charge with a maximum sentence of life imprisonment levelled against him.

A few days later, Steve Martin was attacked and labelled a racist on the basis of 140 characters misconstrued. I recall Octavia Nasr, one of the earliest to fall to the absence of nuance when she was fired from CNN for a tweet that “sympathized with a terrorist.” I see this and hear the pa-pa-ra-pa-pa-pa-pa of the Looney Tunes, I wait for Bugs to pop out of the screen to say, “That’s all, folks!” and hope for Twitter’s adulthood to come soon.