Twitter, outrage and political correctness

So I continue to be off twitter. The only tweets you see from me are the automated tweets that go out (which i customise a bit) every time I write a blog post, which has been fairly often in the last one month or so.

I gave up on my efforts to curate a twitter feed and get the links to pocket. I simply use the Flipboard app on my iPad, which I log on to once a day to see if there are interesting links. For a few days it worked. I collected lots of nice links. I still collect some nice links.

But then the thing with flipboard is that along with the links you end up seeing the twitter commentary that accompanied the links. And I see a lot of outrage. People don’t seem to have patience for a civil discussion on twitter any more. Everyone takes sides, every little topic is dissected like crazy and it’s almost like people have this pathological need to outrage and twitter is their vehicle for that. If this means that this might decrease their outrage in the rest of the world it’s a good thing, but I’m not sure if that is actually happening – it might even be that the constant outrage on twitter is keeping people’s outrage knives sharp and they are outraging more outside too.

Sometimes I like to crack a joke. More often than not it is likely to be offensive and politically incorrect. There is a friend who says he uses twitter exclusively as an outlet for the jokes that build up within his head -to let off steam in some sort of way. But then the extreme outrage and political correctness that twitter imposes on you means that you can never crack a nice harmless politically incorrect joke – people will descend upon you like a pack of wolves, and you get called names and all such.

And so you hold back. And you become a little less of what you were. And you regress. And then you find that you simply can’t function the way you used to a long time back.

Last night I was going through some of my blog posts from 2008 – I go on these trips sometimes. There will be some trigger that will remind me of a particular blog post, and from there I’ll read 20 other adjacent ones. Looking back at the blog posts, they were profound. They were the products of a clean and unfettered mind, who liked to put things out and who didn’t really mind any adverse reactions.

But over the last six years that mind has been dulled, sullied, bullied, into writing possibly only politically correct stuff, which might be flat and hardly profound. So the last month and a half when I’ve been out of twitter has also been an exercise to reclaim myself from @karthiks. And become back closer to skthewimp.livejournal.com – for that is the mode in which I think I function best!

Anyway.. My current thinking is that my facebook and twitter sabbatical will last until the end of October. Going by my brief intrusions into twitter via flipboard, though, it seems like I might stay away for much longer. But you know where to find me!

3 thoughts on “Twitter, outrage and political correctness”

  1. I’ve been reading your posts since long. I like your analytical posts a lot but for quite sometime now I’ve observed a clear tendency to put blame on someone else for your shortcomings. Many people who think they’re intelligent tend have a great deal of confidence in themselves and their understanding. You some how seem a little timid and as you claim, easily bullied. There are many people on Twitter who air their views without bothering about public opinion. Off course, they face a lot of flak for it, but they stay strong and remain themselves. You can’t, so its your problem!

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