Twitter High
I’ve come to the disturbing realization that I am using Twitter to recreate my high school experience. I’m not sure if this means I’m stunted, the Internet is stunted, or the whole process of normative socialization is stunted, but I can no longer deny what I see. I am currently enrolled in Twitter High.
Let’s start with the institution. Organization and segmentation are the typical characteristics of a high school environment. Time is institutionally managed, activities regimented, and the day is broken into 47 minute work intervals with two and a half minutes for travel between classrooms. All this organization promotes compartmentalization. Math is studied for 47 minutes in this room, with these people; a bell rings and within three minutes, you change your work, your peers and your location. So goes the day. Each pursuit has its own setting.
My Internet life operates in similar compartments. I have folders of bookmarks for my different interests, times of the day where I work on different pursuits. I’ve even written myself a daily schedule that cuts my day into half-hour segments.
The activities of my day are vaguely connected by setting. Just like the high school building I took classes in didn’t change, regardless of the class, I am still on my computer, regardless of what I’m doing. And just like in high school, there is some overlap of work and peers; people of similar intelligence level or with similar interests tend to glom together. Communities form, but I’ll get back to that later.
When I open my laptop in the morning, my daily “productive purpose” plays out quite like a school day (though unfortunately, the day doesn’t end in the afternoon but rather continues until I close the laptop again for the night). I force myself to focus for periods and then let myself wander before switching gears. I haven’t bought a bell to ring when I need to change what I’m doing, but I haven’t yet ruled out the purchase.
More compelling than my general organization is my social life. Okay, it’s maybe not that much more compelling, but if I were in high school it would be! After all, that arena launched a million horrible movies, TV shows and best-selling vampire series. High school is all about socializing—trying to hang out with the cool kids and get the girls. Here is where we get to Twitter, the place the Internet goes to socialize.
In high school I hung out with a variety of different groups, which I think is a rather typical experience. I was into music, so I had my music friends. I played sports, so I had my athlete friends. I was good at English, so I had my smart friends and horrible at French, which I didn’t take seriously, so I had my slacker friends.
Here are the main groups I follow on Twitter: battle rappers, professional athletes, writers, bloggers, journalists and people in the media. It seems like I’ve filled my high school quota for cliques (though I won’t tip off which group is the “slacker friend”). I’ve managed to recreate the socialization patterns I had in high school on my Twitter stream, and in no way is that pathetic!
What is easy to miss in all the snark regarding high school is the importance of these categories when we socialize. A large reason Twitter is succeeding is the ease with which we can compartmentalize our interests and manufacture communities. I’m not a part of the world of professional sports, but I get to hang around that world. I’m no rapper, but I get to see battle rappers be creative and appreciate their process even though I’ve never battled (though if I were you, I wouldn’t test me—I got bars). However, I am a part of that loose group of introverts known as “writers, bloggers and journalists” and by participating in that clique, I get to feel some camaraderie. Twitter might benefit the writers most of all, as we wrestle with insomnia, self-doubt, and Vitamin D deficiency while staring at blank Word documents alone in our respective homes.
Basically, Twitter gave me back the ability to do what I love: hang out with people who are more interesting than I am, pick their brains, and be social in a broad sense. My days are more like high school because of it, but I don’t mind—47 minutes of work, then a few minutes of chatting in the hallway. So it goes.
- Jason Oberholtzer
