SOMETHING funny about apps: No matter how much we try to swear one off, another of a similar nature gradually settles in to fill the void. Exhibit A: Yours Truly’s experience. Months after deactivating my Facebook account, I soon realized that Youtube—perhaps the “funnest” app on my phone post-deactivation—made a poor substitute. For one, there was barely any interaction with the larger community. I wasn’t the type to leave or like comments, and neither did I share my own content, so my only incentive for visiting the site was to check if any of my favorite channels uploaded anything new. Second, there wasn’t much in the way of local news, happenings, or chismis in the videos that appeared on my Youtube feed—vagaries which, by contrast, gave my FB account a more localized, distinctly Cebuano or Filipino vibe.
So really, out of sheer boredom, and like a child anxious for a toy to play with, regardless of how old it is, I tapped the icon to my Twitter app and logged back in after about...three years? This was around the middle of 2017, in the midst of one of my longest FB deactivation phases, and my last tweets pertained to my most anticipated movies of 2014. (Ah yes, I remember when I was so looking forward to The Hobbit: There and Back Again. Insert disappointed sigh here.)
I first signed up for the @jack-founded platform back in 2011, amid enthusiastic feedback from college classmates that it was “lingaw” and despite initial hesitation to create another social media account that would require subsequent managing. At first, I didn’t quite get what all the fuss was about. Just like on Facebook, you could “like” (symbolized, though, by a heart instead of a thumbs-up) someone else’s post (tweet, in Twitter terminology), and you could share (retweet) that same post/tweet. The most obvious difference perhaps was that the interface was a lot “messier,” and more frustratingly, tweets couldn’t exceed 140 characters—a proviso especially vexing for someone who’s quite the lengthy poster on FB. There was also a notable tendency for one’s tenses to shift when phrasing posts and tweets. For example, if I were to post about how I “Just walked 20 kilometers” on Facebook, that same text would take on a present-tense form on Twitter (given the more real-time and rapid nature of the platform), hence becoming “Currently walking 20 kilometers.” Lastly, Twitter also had a more “global” feel to it. Whereas only a handful of international celebrities and icons had official FB accounts, on Twitter, many of these folks had verified accounts, allowing us ordinary followers at least even a brief glimpse into their lives, their thoughts.
For a second there, I actually thought Twitter was set to be the next big social media platform, destined to dethrone Facebook the same way the latter had dethroned Friendster only a few years before. Fast forward to today, however, and a good number of those same college classmates who goaded me in the first place haven’t tweeted anything in years.
During my first go-around on the site, I followed the more publicized profiles—my favorite actors, musical artists, authors, film directors, other celebrities. I soon started following more entrepreneurial accounts when I went through this brief phase obsessing over Shark Tank (@ABCSharkTank). And then, when the somewhat tempestuous year that was 2016 hit, I realized I was more of a socialist than a social climber, so I started searching for the Twitter accounts of those personalities and entities who could think “outside the current narrative,” so to speak. Just a few examples: journalist Naomi Klein (@NaomiAKlein), politician Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders), novelist Glenn Diaz (@GlennnDiaz), and nonprofit org Oxfam (@Oxfam). (Side note: Honestly sucks, though, that Arundhati Roy and Noam Chomsky don’t have their own verified Twitter accounts.)
I’ve since deemed Twitter a valuable wellspring of insight and information—rich with tidbits of knowledge and precisely threshed-out opinions that I otherwise wouldn’t have discovered had I still needed to sift through the clutter of FB’s newsfeed. I’ve encountered tweets and commentaries that offer an alternative, more hopeful, but ever-vigilant view on topics my petit bourgeois upbringing tends to hastily conclude as “good” or “progressive” without first considering various, often marginalized and silenced angles.
Incidentally, I’ve also found Twitter to be less addictive than FB, and therefore not as time-consuming. There’s only so much fun you can have when the majority of accounts you follow aren’t those of people you personally know. Twitter also tends to be a notably less toxic (more agreeable) venue for political discourse, and thus it feels like a safer, less disheartening place.
In the seven years since I first joined, Twitter—the underdog of the Philippine social media scene—surprisingly feels like my personal antidote for all the noise of the world. And I’m glad I’m more active on it now than I’ve ever been.