Social media companies are still a relatively new phenomenon. Maybe it’s just not in their nature to stay dominant for very long. Friendster and Google Wave are gone; MySpace limps along; Instagram (owned by Facebook parent Meta) is now threatened by TikTok. Elon Musk seems to be running Twitter into the ground, but the company wasn’t in fantastic shape when he took over.
As I began enjoying Twitter less, I started spending more time reading books. One book I read this year with the time I used to spend scrolling is “No One Is Talking About This,” a novel whose protagonist spends a massive amount of time using a Twitter-like app she calls “the portal.” The author, Patricia Lockwood, is sometimes called the poet laureate of Twitter. One passage has stuck in my mind:
The people who lived in the portal were often compared to those legendary experiment rats who kept hitting a button over and over to get a pellet. But at least the rats were getting a pellet, or the hope of a pellet, or the memory of a pellet. When we hit the button, all we were getting was to be more of a rat.
Things on the internet come and go. I still miss Google Reader. If Twitter goes away, there are aspects of it I will miss. But I won’t miss feeling like a rat.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.