Kristen's Notes

Man I am having some thoughts with all the Twitter happenings. Being part of the generation that was the first to latch on to the internet as a home country has been turbulent for sure.

In the beginning we knew that everything we posted was only temporary. I don’t mourn my xoom.com site, and my livejournal has been long gone and good riddance really (I know that livejournal still exists, however MY account no longer does). However, as the internet became more established I think we, or at least I, came to think of things as more permanent. Our data is stored in the cloud, we can access it at any time and boom nothing ever dies.

But I think we’re seeing Twitter die. And I have really mixed feelings about it.

In 2009, my friend Stacy told me I should join Twitter. It was a way to stay current with the news and we’d be informed way faster than by conventional media. So I did. Abet a bit begrudgingly.

This is my OG account, I lost the password to it in 2010 or 2011 and while I did eventually recover it, my second twitter account was already pretty established so I never really went back to the first one.

Twitter wasn’t love at first sight for me. It was cumbersome to use back in those days and people would talk about it’s high “threshold” for new users. After a year, this was my conclusion.

Sometimes I used it to chronicle my random thoughts (which I still stand by, btw.)

Or to complain about work.

But it’s also a record of the big moments in my life. Like the day I got offered my first teaching job.

Or leaving Nebraska behind.

It was a place I found community, first among the NASA #spacetweeps, and then in DC among the #DCTweetup, and after that with the #NEAFPosse.

I posted my jokes, I posted my frustration.

I met my husband on Twitter.

And now it looks like Twitter is swiftly making itself irrelevant. The students in my classroom don’t use it. They might use Instagram but are more likely to spend their time on Snapchat (which somehow has remained cool) or TikTok. Since the buyout advertisers are pulling out right and left and honestly if I’m going to pay a monthly fee on the internet it’s going to be for my own space where I can call the shots.

I also have an edit button.

The only thing I feel like I’ve lost is my community. Honestly though, with the bots and the trolls and the rising tide of swill that has plagued twitter and all social media in the past few years, in many ways the community had already evaporated.

Friends have already started to delete their accounts, and so like a woman salvaging my most treasured belongings from a burning house, I went and screenshotted the tweets that remained in the hashtag we made for our wedding.

What a day, what a time. What an example of the best that twitter could be.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.