What use is Twitter (now called “X” but still better known as “Twitter”)?
It has millions of users, who can post whatever they want, so there’s lots of information on very different topics. Sometimes there’s something funny, humanly appealing, or surprising in a good way. And there are idiosyncratic accounts that routinely post things that are helpful or just a pleasure to engage with.
There’s also, of course, lots of nonsense, falsehood, half-truth, and so on. It’s a good source for breaking news, and also for opinions, insults, hot takes, talking points, and dogmatic pronouncements. These can be honest, informed, and perceptive, or the very opposite. So they should be viewed with caution.
Twitter also lets us see unguarded reactions from public figures. These tell us something not only about the figure himself but about the world he lives in and how things appear to its inhabitants. And it shows what’s on people’s minds and what they make of it. That can be depressing, and it’s not clear how representative the chatter is, but it represents at least a slice of humanity.
There’s not much consecutive discussion. But there is some, and there are devoted souls who seem to spend hours daily trying to improve discussion of some issue, usually by patiently reminding people of the obvious. (“The sexes really are different, and that matters, but that doesn’t mean everyone has to hate everybody…”)
Quite often you pick up something worth knowing, or have occasion to articulate something that’s not obvious to everyone or that you hadn’t thought through yourself. But it’s rare to run into anything profound, inspirational, or coherent enough to change your outlook much. For most of us, most of the time, it’s mostly a waste of time and attention—a sort of addiction.
So much for private aspects. There’s also its public effect.
Journalists seem obsessed with Twitter. And judging by the voices calling Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform a threat to democracy, they think it’s very important. That is believable.
Nothing complicated works as expected. The Internet and Twitter were supposed to democratize discussion, but they have done very little to close the gap between political people and the rest of the population. Bubbles remain bubbles, special pursuits remain special pursuits, and if specialists get a forum for discussion, their concerns become even more specialized.
But Twitter and the Internet do multiply the points of view publicly available, and sometimes force dominant views to respond to objections. The response is often simply to develop ways of neutralizing objections—double down, change the topic, throw dust in the air, declare critics and their objections illegitimate.
Even so, the existence of Twitter in particular makes it harder to keep obvious points out of the discussion. The Libs of TikTok account is an obvious example. Widespread insanity is easy to deny when professionals back it. Which should you believe, the consensus of trained experts or bizarre claims from unqualified nobodies? Chaya Raichik, a nobody working in a small real estate office in Brooklyn, changed that dynamic just by reposting spectacular examples of what the nobodies were complaining about.
Twitter, however, has other effects on discussion. These are largely bad, since it’s hard to multiply quantity and maintain quality. Cutting positions down to tweet size and putting them in constant combat makes them as crude and inflexible as clubs. Also, extreme views are memorable and require few words, so they get passed around and talked about, and soon dominate the discussion.
There seems no way out of this. If you link to a longer piece with more complexity, people ignore it and just react to some word in the tweet.
Among other things, this situation promotes bad arguments. Good arguments require patience and charity, while the Twitter format promotes abruptness and attack. So people accustom themselves to bad arguments. And that leads them into bad faith, willful stupidity, and contempt for their audience and especially their opponents.
The above applies also to Catholic Twitter. How could it be otherwise, when the medium exerts the same influence, and so much of Catholicism has become secular politics?
But how do we respond to all this?
At an individual level, we should no doubt be prudent and moderate if we’re going to use Twitter at all. Real life is better and more important than the Twitterverse. That’s boring advice, but what can you do?
At the public level, the almost universal response is to try to figure out how to use it for control.
Before his acquisition, Elon Musk spoke somewhat idealistically of Twitter as “the de facto public town square” in which “failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy.”
The comment was met with a chorus of catcalls, because no one who matters really believes that. Political actors want to propagate their own views and eliminate or marginalize other views. It could hardly be otherwise. They are political because they love power or because they believe their views are true and beneficial and opposing views are the opposite. What chance does an abstract scheme of liberal rights have against such motives in a world of crude and mendacious public discussion?
So it’s not surprising that the most ardent calls for freedom and democracy on the Internet come from people, mostly on the right, whose views are being suppressed.
More respectable people, who can speak freely and mostly think their opponents should just shut up, may also appeal to freedom and democracy, since these are fundamental liberal principles. But they say that real freedom and democracy require a supervised town square that is safe, equitable, and inclusive, with speech that reflects correct facts and acceptable inferences. That, they believe, will mean a democracy that reaches the right conclusions.
In short, they want freedom and democracy that, like the Soviet version, confirms by acclamation beliefs and conclusions already determined in some other way.
And Twitter and the Internet do lend themselves to mind control. Their effect on users is to break particular connections and dissolve the world into a chaos of unrelated images and soundbites that can be assembled to mean anything whatever.
So they are part of a process whereby virtual reality swallows everything. Chaos doesn’t last, so the virtual reality soon populates with alternate realities that are mostly ill-founded and even insane. And that creates a demand for a restored common order. To orient themselves in the world, people need a coherent story that they share with others and defines reality for them.
And there are people ready to meet the demand. Whoever is strongest and can claim presumptive public authority can engage people and institutions to construct a picture of the world that people, for the most part, will accept and live by. As recent public life shows, the result is that even intelligent, experienced, and seemingly well-informed people can be brought to believe almost anything.
How can ordinary people escape the web of unreality? If they want to discuss something, they look to social media, and if they want to find anything out, they consult Google. These can both be channeled by search, engagement, and propagation algorithms. Developments in AI seems likely to enhance that ability, and the alternative can seem to be free-floating theorizing that easily goes crazy.
So the general tendency of Twitter and the Internet is anarchy, and through anarchy to thought control. We need to resist that in favor of an independent, more direct, and more adequate understanding of reality. An obvious thing Catholics can do is insist on the Catholic vision of reality, which is independent, grounded, and far more adequate than that of our rulers or most of their opponents.
Today, more than ever, extra ecclesiam nulla salus. Our very grip on reality depends on the Church. But that will only work if the Church is true to herself, and maintenance of an independent view has been made more difficult by the merger of much institutional Catholic thought into secular progressivism.
So the thing we need most of all, at least collectively, is something we have no power to bring about—better Church leadership. In the meantime, we can try to keep ourselves within the tradition of the Church, and do our best to withdraw from the virtual world in favor of a more direct relation to concrete realities. We also need to pray: as always, how it all turns out is in God’s hands.
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And then there are those of us who watched the herd stampede first to THIS new internet gossip site, an then to THAT new gossip site, and then the next, Faceplant, Tweeter, Instagag, etc., living on them, drawing all their nourishment and “knowledge” from them, and we thought them all incredibly stupid and ripe for, and rife with, bullying and manipulation we’d already seen on internet forums…
and so we utterly ignored them, pretty much the same way we ignored the original gossip medium, the telephone, which was ignored except for real use.
Remember when most people knew that yakking on the phone all day was bad for you, and that those who did so were the butt end of jokes?
Now our brave new world is a giant gossiping party line, and then people wonder why the wheels are falling off of it.
I think the original gossip mediums were the community well, the marketplace, the traveling peddler, the tavern, etc.
Twitter just enabled gossip to go online & become global.
Well, there also were newspapers, but I meant electronic which is far more omnipresent than a paper or a well ever dreamed of being.
True, newspapers played a role spreading gossip. Those have become largely electronic also.
There also was TV to which folk became addicted, my dad calling it the GDIB, with IB standing for Idiot Box. I recall with smart phones at work suddenly seeing men yakking non-stop on phones, which was shocking enough, and then friendly break times filled with conversation and jokes suddenly became strangers sitting around ignoring each other while they noodled on phones…and then WHAT they were looking at and sometimes coming out of only to show someone else was generally some infinite variety of eeeewwww.
I’m a widow (my late husband died of COVID in 2020 before the vaccines came out) and I’m not on Twitter, Facebook, Tik Tok, or any other social media platforms- and never have been and never will be. I am involved with Catholic World Report, another Catholic “forum” (old-fashioned!), and I read and occasionally make a comment on a World News forum. I prefer conversations with real people in real-life settings (standing in line anywhere, restaurants, church, my neighborhood, etc.). I also watch a lot of TV, listen to the radio (mainly EWTN), and read many book (too many!) I think that online conversations lead to loneliness and isolation–not what God made us for.
So what IS TRUTH? Social media and AI are here and we as Christians must learn how to live faithfull to the Gospel. How can we know what is true outside of our own first hand experiences when computers can generate fake images of people saying things that they never said or doing things that they never did? Is there any objective reality outside of us that we can know as true? How can we know the extent that our minds -thoughts, preferences, ideals, allegiances etc. – are being implanted in us by outside sources? For years Madison ave and advertising has been telling us how to spend our money, but now technology is increasingly telling us how to vote and what to believe. Both liberalism one conservativism are very intolerant of dissent, demanding conformity. What to do? Are we concerned? Are we ready? What about our children? Our schools? The Pope very rightly has voiced concern.
Well, if people weren’t wasting away their lives on the (expletive deleted) things, they wouldn’t be exposed to all the ills you listed, would they?
Not too long ago, part of examination of conscience prior to confession included asking self if one had desire for very latest news and gossip, as well as frivolous entertainments.
But, today, people act as if those things both constitutional and God-given rights, when frittering away a life is an actual sin, and us destined for greater things.
Cue all the moans of “that’s too hard”, “that’s impossible in today’s world (if I want to keep up with everybody else especially the Joneses)”, while the only truly impossible things are those never attempted.
“Is there any objective reality outside of us that we can know as true? How can we know the extent that our minds -thoughts, preferences, ideals, allegiances etc. – are being implanted in us by outside sources?” JC asks.
If our minds, bodies, and souls employ Revelation and faith in His Church as He and She has taught through the ages, the certitude of our faith informs. There IS a God who IS. He is the creator of objective goodness, beauty, and Truth. The world attempts to make men question the providence and indeed the very existence of the real truth of God. IF men allow the allegiances of the world to supplant their allegiance to God, to the faith, to the Church, then men become confused, uncertain, torn, and tortured, and slaves to sin, to error, to the world and its brutality.
Truly, why should we care about virtual reality? Like all else, we should use it for the greater glory and honor of God. Is not our concern eternal reality?
You ask what Truth is. There stands Pontius Pilate. He asked the same question. Why was he unable to recognize Who stood in front of him to be judged??? Does the ironic tragedy of his choice and his historical legacy not horribly impress us?
It should!
We influence all those God puts in our paths. Modern media allows us to know the pope. The Church teaches that he is the de facto ‘protector and guardian’ of the deposit of faith which God designed for our benefit. The Church and our faith is OUR God-given GIFT. It was given into the pope’s hands by his predecessors through Jesus Christ, the Lord of All Creation, for us.
Question: How well does does Francis protect and guard the God-given elements of faith and TRUTH>? Has he not, rather, made a thorough sludge? Media has shown the many times, the ample evidence, of the faith having been tossed to worldly whims, to do with as it wills.
Meanwhile, Objective Reality has given us intellect, will and grace (if we choose) to make any and all course-corrections we need. It is almost never too late.
If I may meiron, in your correct response to Connor’s Cartesian doubt extending to thought itself, you correctly state “the certitude of our faith informs”. Aquinas defines certitude as apprehending subject and predicate in one act of knowing. So if we have objective certainty of things without, and self reflective knowledge of our person in the act of perceiving things that certitude [of self] is apodictic. It cannot be refuted. In effect what James Connor is asking, How do we know our thoughts are implanted by outside sources? Connor is unwittingly making inference to God who is ultimate cause of all things. Although he moves our will we remain with freedom of will. Why we say God is omnipotent and incomprehensible.
Also I appreciate your recent take on the SSPX that many of their members are simply seeking doctrinal stability with which I agree.
Why are you writing to me?
Because I felt remiss in not responding to you personally after you advised my regarding the intentions of member of the SSPX. The comment I made was in response to Bob.
I don’t use Twitter. Nor do I use Facebook.Except for emailing friends, I don’t use these types of media. I have no interest at all in other people’s private lives ( even those of friends and relatives) and I don’t want others poking into my private life either. By my observation of news articles, both of these social media have frequently been used to facilitate bullies. It has done harm by allowing people, especially teens, to choose a victim to attack, often another teen with no strong self-image, and socially isolate them. I as an adult have an especially strong sense of self,and would as an adult shrug off mean comments, but children and teens are often too vulnerable to do so. Suicide is sometimes the result.The media is sometimes used to destroy reputations, damage careers, force social compliance to an ideology with which one does not agree. Does anyone with a brain really need to participate in such a system and cover themselves with such sludge?? I don’t think so. Therefore I chose to opt out. I advise others to do so as well. I simply don’t need anyone else’s approval of my life.
A good cut through the complexity of a media giant and its actual platform for the political movers and the marginalized right of left public. One of the reasons for my withdrawal.
Although as small fry absent Church leadership Kalb a good attorney pleads a justice settlement based on withdrawal from media and return to home and the concrete life of good works and prayer. Although as a personal view I think persons like Kalb with intelligence and faith should remain a voice in the media wilderness.
The Daily Mail has an article today about what happened to an Amazonian tribe after they got connected to the internet through Elon Musk’s Starlink:
Leaders of a remote tribe in the Amazon rainforest have told how the arrival of the internet has left its members grappling with the trappings of social media addiction and pornography while falling for online scams.
The Marubo people, who for hundreds of years existed in small huts scattered along the Itui River in Brazil, were last year introduced to high-speed internet for the first time thanks to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite programme.
Tribespeople were suddenly able to call for help in the event of an emergency, with medical helicopters able to reach the injured in a matter of hours rather than days. They could also connect instantly with relatives or friends camped dozens of miles further down the river, or even further afield.
But shortly after the Marubo people were introduced to the pleasures of the internet, the perils quickly began to reveal themselves.
Now the indigenous tribal leaders report that people are becoming lazy, spending hours scrolling social media with teens hooked on graphic porn…”
It all sounds sadly familiar
We read: “So the thing we need most of all, at least collectively, is something we have no power to bring about—better Church leadership. In the meantime, we can try to keep ourselves within the tradition of the Church…”
About “the Church”:
“…the terminological shift from ‘Church’ to ‘community’ [or only a synodal Church?] reveals more convincingly, perhaps, than is revealed anywhere else the inner process of the Reformation’s transposition of the structure of faith. For Luther, Church meant community [!], whereas the Church as ‘successio’, as the unity of binding tradition in a sacramental and personal form [!], loses for him her theological content. At best, she becomes an instrument, an organization; at worst, she is the Antichrist, the organized and sacrally clothed obstacle to the ‘gospel’ (by which he means, not the four Gospels or the Bible as such, but the message of justification as the central concept of Holy Scripture [revelation detached from natural law?]). According to this gospel, all that is valid theologically is the individual community that comes together and places itself under the word” (Ratzinger/Benedict, “Principles of Catholic Theology,” Ignatius, 1987, p. 291).
But, instead of “the individual community, “…the Church is formed by the Eucharist.”
“…Where the Eucharist is present–that is, in whatever place, in the congregation celebrating the Eucharist in one place–there the whole Lord [!] and the whole Church [!] are present with the whole mystery of the sacrament. A congregation that celebrates the eucharist needs nothing more. It has the whole Lord; in the sacrament, it thus has also the whole Church and IS [italics] the whole Church [….]” (ibid., 292).
So, about the mirage of “better Church leadership:”
…we already have it from the 4th-century Donatist Controversy and the Council of Carthage in A.D. 411, that the sacraments and the Eucharist, even when celebrated by corrupt and apostate priests, are still wholly valid. So, we stay in the Church—especially when a leadership “climate change” seems a long way off.
Twitter, (X) is in-your-face corrupt and replete with misinforation, and Musk knows it is. Twitter has never encrypted its direct messages, despite calls from cybersecurity activists to do so.
District Court Judge Terry Doughty, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, issued a preliminary injunction on Tuesday that bars several federal departments and agencies from various interactions with social media companies. Note: Trump is the arch pervayer of misdirection and lies. US President Donald Trump’s Twitter account is “permanently suspended… due to the risk of further incitement of VIOLENCE”, the company says.
Excerpt: “An obvious thing Catholics can do is insist on the Catholic vision of reality, which is independent, grounded, and far more adequate than that of our rulers or most of their opponents.
We must continue to make every effort and write our congressmen to ask for a bill that allows the government oversee these platforms.
Elon Musk is not a Christian but he has strongly supported prolife causes ,scorns transgenderism, has no use for wokism , tried to get industry to move with caution on AI and has exposed to the world the impending population collapse with its economic impacts. When there is very little free speech left people are forced to listen to what little remains including rumors. Maintaining a little window for free speech has been Musk’s principal goal. By the way, at the end of the 60 Minutes interview in answer to her question about young girls one day being deacons and priests the Vicar of Christ who IS the magisterium answered with a resounding and definitive NO! On the Reason and Theology website it was reported that Tik Tok had banned the Popes reply as “hate speech”.
You seem woefully ignorant of the First Amendment and reality.
The government can’t regulate itself (it’s $36T dollars in the hole) and you want it regulating speech?
Spare me from the childish mind that says “there ought to be a law”. We need to be free of the idolatrous worship of government, not further enslaved to it.
To me, there are two Twitters, my Twitter and the other Twitter. Mine only focuses on people I follow, and they are very carefully chosen. Most of them are Catholics with whom I share beliefs, prayers, arts, music, etc., while others are those whom I respect for their opinions on various subjects, those who ask for prayers, make me laugh, etc. The other Twitter is the one that is heavily politicized, is inhabited by trolls, and tends to be negative no matter what the subject is. I like my Twitter very much.