Life as Mystery: The Light Side of Twitter

I used to rail against Twitter, for all the usual reasons. Now I am pretty active in the Twitter community, such as it is. I joined for reasons of networking, initially—no sense in falling behind on the social tools available to me, I figure—but I have found far more delight in it that as a simple tool for self-promotion.

I am lucky enough that my followers do not merely consist of some analog friends and a few bots—there are people on Twitter who I have never met in person, or met only cursorily, who nevertheless follow and respond to what I say. And in reading them, and trying to view my own tweets with fresh eyes, I am fascinated by the insular, uninformative nature of a typical tweet.

People on Twitter do not generally tell you who they are, where they are, what they are doing; tweets do not usually come with footnotes or backstory. They are slices of a person's life served up without context, references to "the trip" or "the girls" or a never-before-mentioned "Bob" that leave the reader just informed enough to know that they probably didn't understand that tweet at all.

Some of this, of course, is part of Twitter's infamously bad signal-to-noise ratio, the "babbling out loud about one's unexceptional life" that has so captivated critics. And certainly, things like my friend @ragaraja's Quotes of the Day or @hodgman's outbursts of surrealism are the highlights of my Twitter experience, along with the occasional innovative uses of the medium.

But those little slices of everyday life, when done right, they are some of the best parts of my Twitter experience. Those tweets feel like little mystery novelettes to me, tiny hints at some greater set of unifying facts. They show me that some lives are exceptional—that for every three office workers there is someone working with deaf college students, or doing freelance art; that there are people of talent finding opeace and success in this world. And beyond that, these tweets help to remind me that as unified as our lives are now, there are parts of us that are not laid bare, that are not served up for public consumption. They remind me of our individuality and the manifold twists and turns that make each life unique: universal truth found in vague nouns.

Even more than this, those tweets make me think; they make me research, and wonder, and shift my brain around trying to contextualize these people, trying to understand as much of the world as I can. They are little reminders of the Socratic definition of wisdom, served up to me fresh every day. And maybe it's overly optimistic of me; but I figure, if I can find little mysteries and hidden smiles in Twitter, the rest of life can't be that difficult.