2022-05-23 14:13:31
Some thoughts on telegram (and twitter)..
After spending 6 months with my e-attention focused here after my old twitter account was shoahed, I recently decided to get back on twitter and this experience provoked some thoughts on how each medium shapes discourse. On twitter you see a lot more friendship and positive interaction between 'dissident right' accounts despite their ideological differences than you do on here where you get these factional rivalries, and I think this is almost entirely down to the difference between how the two sites are designed.
Twitter's layout encourages dissident right accounts to focus on criticizing non-dissident right accounts together, which creates more solidarity than telegram where the only other accounts we can see are each other's. Twitter also enables anon accounts to build followings of their own to enhance their social experience - on telegram if you don't already have a decent following of your own because of pre-established notoriety, all you can do is be an anon in someone else's comment section. This experience for anons therefore becomes one of identifying with a particular clique on the DR and getting into arguments with the others (because what else is there really to do if you don't have your own channel to post on that people will reply to you on?) - on twitter you can express yourself more and are less likely to be hostile to others because even with a small account you can make posts of your own that get interactions and so you don't need to hang out in the replies of some other large account to get a decent social experience.
Twitter might be a better social experience in this regard, but I think this has a downside in the sense that due to its post lengths being so short and the noise-to-signal level being so much higher for users it encourages novelty takes for the sake of novelty takes and humorous quips instead of more elaborate thoughts. If I posted the same effortposts I do on here on twitter they would become a super long thread that noone on there has the attention span to read - on telegram however it feels more like I have a microblog which people are coming to check with the intention of giving it a few minutes of their time.. On twitter you need to grab someone's attention in the first couple seconds or they keep scrolling. For this reason I think twitter melts people's brains into often quite superficial ideological aesthetics that don't translate into strong ideological identities, whereas on telegram if you don't have much substance to your worldview noone is going to make the effort to keep checking your channel or participate in your comments section.
So anyway I guess there's pros and cons to both - on twitter you can participate in refining the DR's outward facing narratives and will have a more socially edifying experience that immunizes you somewhat from acting like a cunt, but on telegram you get forced to commit to a more refined ideological identity and can block out the noise emitted by everyone but the people you want to hear from the most. Anyway, I was thinking of making a big groupchat in twitter DMs, so hit me up with your twitter acc if you want in.
1.3K viewsImperium Press, 11:13
I
