An assortment of thoughts about Twitter and intimacy

I

What we do online is real to the people who care about us.

We live a lot of our lives online. We have conversations, flirtations, and even whole relationships online, and much of it is done in plain sight.  We’re exhibitionists.

We’re also voyeurs. We watch each other and speculate about conversations and goings on that float through our feeds. We seek emotional cues from and try to assess where we stand in the lives of those we care about, be they friend, crush, or colleague.

And though we accept the exhibitionism, we scoff at the voyeurism. It’s something we’ve decided should be shameful. “Creeping,” “lurking,” and “stalking” are the verbs we use for the audience half of our performer-audience activities.

When something posted online causes a reaction, we say, “It’s just Twitter,” or, “It’s just Facebook,” as if the medium is reason enough to dismiss the message and its accompanying response.

Our friend confides, “I know I shouldn’t care, but...” But he unfriended you, and it really fucking hurts. Why shouldn’t you care about that?

It hurts to see you’re not invited to the party. It hurts to see your love flirting with others. It hurts to see a peer get your dream job.

Our online lives are realities—sometimes the only realities people can see. By shaming voyeurism, we’re distancing ourselves from the emotional consequences our online activities have on others. We’re shirking responsibility.

II

When we live so much of our lives online, are we creating barriers to intimacy?

Of course, we’re putting a layer of technology between us and other people. More than that, we’re throwing bits of ourselves out to the world, casting a wide net of charm and flirtation. Within the context of an established long-term relationship, this may be fine and healthy. But what about those of us seeking to establish intimacy? The gap between “getting to know” and “intimate” seems to be widening, and it’s getting increasingly difficult to bridge.

We carry fragile egos, so we simultaneously look for signs that we matter to others while also being careful not to give too much away.

Voyeur brain scans their feed for something—anything—that will indicate they’re thinking about us as much as we’re thinking about them. Seeing nothing, our exhibitionist brain is careful to only post things that clearly communicate we are happy, complete, and successful individuals who couldn’t possibly care about the amazing date we had last night, which is so totally unimportant it won’t be mentioned or alluded to in any way whatsoever while we’re busy demonstrating our desirability by ostentatiously flirting with this guy over here.

We affect cool so we won’t appear overzealous and leave ourselves vulnerable for rejection. It’s a classic losing scenario, amplified by 1,000 thanks to the very public nature of social media.

III

It’s hard to trust a persona.

Twitter, for me, is a playground. I exorcise demons and exercise hyperbole. I’m liberal with emotions, and I’m flexible with fact. I firehose affection to anyone and everyone—sometimes genuine, sometimes ironic. I tweet exactly what I’m feeling, and I tweet the opposite of what I’m feeling. I tweet jokes. I tweet ideas. I tweet nonsensical babblings. I tweet anything and everything, and I don’t really give much thought to a “personal brand.”

Twitter is performance art. I play a persona, and it’s sort of a shattered-mirror reflection of who I really am. The trouble is (and the beauty is) that I successfully confound people and make it difficult for them to know where I stand or where they stand with me.

For an artist, to see evidence that what you’re doing has any effect on people is a thrill. But for a human, it’s lonely to be misunderstood and difficult to trust. 

IV 

What needs to change?

Intimacy in the age of social media requires commitment. If you want to get someone across the bridge from casual partner to lasting love, you have to be willing to sacrifice and be vulnerable. You have to become trustworthy in order to be trusted.

For me, that likely means a dramatic shift in my Twitter behaviors, sacrificing a large portion of what I’ve come to consider my art. For most, it probably just means heightened conscientiousness, putting yourself under the intense scrutiny of someone who’s trying to win your affection.

If we can admit that people are watching us, that what we do affects them, and that real intimacy requires vulnerability and trust—and if we’re willing to change based on that knowledge—we may just have a shot at intimacy, after all.