Twitter Break

Get yourself a twitter account they said. I can’t remember who said it or when, but someone did, and so I did. I got a Twitter account.

I was being clever. All I needed to do was acquire a large following of erm, followers, and point them all gently at my blog. Traffic would skyrocket, and publishers would fall at my feet. My arse.

The trouble with Twitter is that if you don’t tweet, it forgets about you, and your posts are hidden. The only thing that matters is engagement. If you don’t engage you’re invisible. That’s the trap.

And so that’s how it went for the last year. I built a following of over 8k followers and engaged with them by asking thoughtful questions like “have you ever stood on a piece of Lego?” And uploading pictures of mashed potatoes. The long nights just flew by.

The trouble is, of those 8k followers, only a handful of them click through to the blog. I’m grateful for the kind words and encouragement that I received from those that did, but what soon becomes apparent is that my blog isn’t exactly a hive of activity. My last post was uploaded in August, and it’s pictures of a miniature Tardis against the stunning scenery of Morecambe Bay, not the fictional stories with which I’d hoped to make my name . Twittering has become the thing that fills my time.

Of those 8k followers, I probably engage with only about fifty of them, and some of those would be fun to know in real life, if the world wasn’t quite so huge. Who are the other 7950 followers? And why do they follow if they don’t engage?

And then there’s the politics. When you spend a lot of time on Twitter, it’s easy to imagine that it’s representative of the world. It’s not. Some voices are amplified beyond their weight and against the reason they cannot hear. It’s refreshing to step outside of that space and take in the fresh air.

In the few short days since I uninstalled Twitter, I have written an article about Christmas, edited a short story that I wrote in March, and started reading a book I bought last year. These are the things I wanted to be doing, instead of Doom Scrolling from sun up to sun up again. I came very close to deleting my account. It’s the only surefire way to stop me relapsing, but that seemed extreme, and something I might regret.

I survived the week without telling the world about my meals. My sausage casserole was no less delicious for going unreported online. My existence is not diminished for missing another international something or other awareness day. But I did spend some of my evenings writing, and I did go to sleep feeling positive, and awoke feeling refreshed.

So I broke the break today to see what I had missed. I installed Twitter and logged in. There was a couple of notifications. Other accounts that felt as I did about it, but for the 12.5k tweets I’d posted previously there was no new engagement and I have to ask myself how else might I have spent that time? The answer of course is writing, and I have much catching up to do.

The only question that remains is whether I promote this post on Twitter.