When This Blows Over

As the [social media] platforms age, their devotees
become more and more distinct from the regular
person. For more than a decade now, many people in
media and technology have been feeding an hour or
two of Twitter into our brains every single day.
Because we’re surrounded by people who live their
lives like this—and, crucially, because so many of the
journalists who write about the internet experience the
internet in this way—it might feel like this is just how
Twitter is, that a representative sample of America is
plugged into the machine in this way.
But it’s not. Twitter is not America. And few people
who work outside the information industries choose
to spend their lives reading tweets, let alone writing
them.
Twitter is a highly individual experience that works
like a collective hallucination, not a community.
It’s probably totally fine that a good chunk of the
nation’s elites spend so much time on it. What could
go wrong?
ALEXIS C. MADRIGAL