Twitter loci communes
One of these days Twitter will be no more. Or at least my Twitter account. Whether that future is distant or near, it will happen. I stopped actively tweeting or even retweeting anything beyond links to my published work a couple months into the pandemic. That was after resuming “normal” Twitter activity following a self-imposed months-long hiatus. During that whole period of time, across the last two years or so, I’ve seriously contemplated deleting my account more than once. I’ve come very close. But I haven’t quite been able to quit having an account, even if I’ve successfully quit replying to mentions, liking tweets, retweeting, “engaging” in “the discourse,” etc. I also don’t scroll the feed—ever. I spend 5-15 minutes per day on Twitter, by which I mean, unless I’m sharing a new publication, I check the same 3-6 writers’ accounts the way I “follow” RSS feeds on Feedly. I’m more or less happy with my Twitter usage, then, though I continue to think the platform the purest of poisons on our common life. If I had a button to destroy it tomorrow, I’d press it in a heartbeat.
So. Since I’m not “on” Twitter in a strong way anymore, and since I’m confident neither the site nor my account is long for this world, and since before I stopped being an active user I had some pleasant conversations and wrote a few fun threads, I’ve been thinking about how to maintain, or transmit, some of that. Here’s my answer.
Twitter loci communes.
The Latin means “common places.” What I’m going to do on this blog, intermittently and with no plan of action, is reproduce topics and threads and lines of thought I developed on Twitter sometime in the years since I created an account in 2013. Not by embedding the tweets but simply by copying and pasting them here, either as normal prose or in block quotes.
In fact, I’ve already done that twice: earlier this year in response to ACU’s upset of UT in March Madness and a couple weeks back on the feast of St. Monica. We’ll count those as TLC #1 and #2. Next will be #3, whatever and whenever that may be. But I’ll link back to this page for future posts so that folks know what it is, and I’ll tag all TLC posts (including those two retroactive ones) as such, so anybody who’s interested—all two dozen of you—can track them down.
Twitter may not be all evil; perhaps it’s only 99%. This little side project is a way of preserving the 1%, if only for myself.
