Every "chronically online" conversation is the same

by pulling millions of people into the potential audience for every post or tweet or photo, these companies force everyone to treat every conversation as a potential performance to millions of total strangers.

But conversations  should not  be performances, unless they are explicitly staged as such. Conversations should not be battleground

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I’m thinking out loud about this, but there’s something interesting about the idea that social-media platforms now create this real distance, in part by being text-heavy. And that distance can lead you to say things or do things you’d never do in the physical world. It also lowers the bar for engagement, which means that firing off a shitty tweet i... See more

some are enclosed in this online world and develop a disordered relationship to time.

but their apparent pervasiveness underlines the consensus that the public internet exists only for the purposes of yelling into the void

I think it’s just that we don’t talk about this stuff out loud very much. I feel the same way describing the kind of social anxiety I get from performative parts of social media—to detail it out loud feels unhinged. But I think most people are feeling similar stuff. It’s bleeding into everyone’s behaviors.