This is my public position:

Every tweet chips a piece out of peoples limited stock of attention — repetitive babblers are noise pollution.

— Outsideness (@Outsideness) February 23, 2014

The medium works its junkie magic because ‘unfollowing’ is an implicit act of microsocial aggression (whatever its rational motives), triggering primate brain-chemicals associated with social signalling. It’s as if you had suddenly declared an unwillingness to any longer pick ticks out of somebody’s fur. At a certain point this monkey business has to be over-ridden, or deterioration is all-but inevitable. People who aren’t prepared to to protect their time — even at the cost of social discomfort — will get nothing done. That’s the threat of social media, as a disease.

Since tweet-space is limited by nature, some background to informational hygiene procedures:

(1) I have two twitter feeds, and (for obvious time-preservation reasons) I’m not going to be following anybody on both. Non-NRx types who’ve been chucked out of my @Outsideness feed are most likely implanted on @UF_blog, so that should not count as microsocial violence except to the hyper-sensitive.

(2) Opinion signalling without thought or originality is tedious. Even if I agree with everything someone is saying, they’ll be chopped if they never say anything new. Something that’s new once isn’t new after being repeated 500 times. Sadly, there are all too many reactionaries who think the very idea of saying something new is close to civilizational treason. (I’m sure they have an audience, but I’m not it.)

(3) Twitter babbling is grating on me a lot. I don’t care about your mating or drinking habits. If I have to listen to you talking about either at a rate exceeding one tweet a day, we have to part ways. Also, the rampant ‘alpha’ peacocking in the reactosphere is getting utterly repulsive. If you want to persuade people you’re intelligent, try saying something intelligent. Saying “You know what, I’m really freaking intelligent” is about as pathetic as human communication can get. (Such statements probably have an audience that finds them charming and witty, but I’m not it.)

(4) Basically, I don’t care about you at all, but only about the information and ideas you share. The odd joke is OK, but it better stay odd. Cognitive survival demands that I dig out my inner ruthless bastard, and I will.

ADDED: A typology of Twitter conversations.