What do you do when a medium dies?
I neglect the long form for the micro. Most of my thoughts have been in less than 240 characters for the last 15 years.
There has been an interesting thought-experiment permeating throughout that particular zeitgeist recently; what do you do when you see a platform you enjoy and regularly consume dismantled?
Twitter will likely continue to exist. But much like a specific particle, because of the sheer fact that something—someone is observing it, its state will change. And when that state becomes incompatible with your message, what is one to do?
You make a blog.
Don’t get me wrong, I hate that sentence as much as the next. No one should read this, and very few likely will. But that was and is true about my Twitter too — so what’s the use?
“What came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?”
Rob, High Fidelity
I adore the movie and book High Fidelity, both as a teenager and now. I preface that with the teenager bit because the reason I know it exists is solely due to this chick I had a crush on in high school who loved Nick Hornby. But it’s also a great story and biting representation of that period in your late 20s when you swear you don’t want to be like everyone else, but really wish your life was a bit more normal.
If you replaced “listening to music” with “reading the news” in that quote, you’d have a pretty accurate representation of what Twitter became to me and most of humanity in the last decade.
The book has a great trope where Rob is constantly listing his “Top 5” list of something, allowing him to be disk jockey or Billboard chart of his own life. It’s partially a fun comedic callback, and partially an example of a man that doesn’t realize that there’s nuance to life and that there isn’t as much dichotomy in the world as he projects.
And with that lesson I’ve decided to make a Top 10 series called SRM.top_10. Hope all two of you enjoy.