Global Mood Swings!

Recently, at a meet-up of Twitter folks, a couple of people asked me whether I had retired from Twitter. They had a point. Sure, I still shared links, but not only were they few in number, I also mostly stayed away from conversation. My reasons were that I had seen people and their agenda on Twitter change  (from the first time I had encountered them on the platform) – the vanity numbers affecting the ego, the loss of humility, the perceived slights and the overall nature of conversations that are more to convince and score points, than to understand and gain perspectives. From discuss to diss and cuss, as bad wordplay would go. 🙂

Yes, there are some great folks around with whom I have conversations, funnily enough more over DM, phone, other networks and offline meetings! One could also prune the feed to maximise this, but one could also read a book!

I had alluded to this in a previous post – Binary Code – the increasing disappearance of nuance in our consumption. Obviously, this is also happening in creation. In less than a couple of decades, we have moved from being in bubbles formed from having only a few information sources to ones made from having too many. We aren’t used to having a microphone in the hand, and it’s showing. Making things binary in consumption and reasoning is a way of coping with unbridled creation. It’s also not being helped by search engine and social algorithms accentuating and reinforcing pre existing notions and showing us the kind of things we’d like. Sanitised for our unique taste buds.

I suspect all of this is irreversible, mostly because ‘why bother?’ It actually wouldn’t be a problem if the bubbles could co-exist with minimal contact. But no, that is an impossibility, because..internet, (read) and a more active social life in general! Combine that with the perspective that “bad moods are a global migration problem” and we have set ourselves up for a potential contagion – sparked by any conversation – from income disparity to politics to racial supremacy to religion to fights over Pokemon Go! The likelihood of a domino effect following such an occurrence is superbly brought out in “History tells us what may happen next with Brexit & Trump“.

In the meanwhile, as the epics have advised, “Do not twitter uselessly like a bird” 😉

P.S. Well done Economist