It was always someone else’s real estate

For an old guy, I like to think I do pretty well with technology. But after the last month of moving and setting up new accounts of various kinds – bank, cable and internet, the list goes on and on – I’m fed up with new account names and new passwords. Does that mean I won’t eventually settle into one of the other social media services? No. But I just don’t have the heart or will to do it now.

Twitter has always been odd as hell. Some of my most rewarding times on social media have been spent there, as well as some of my most frustrating.

But it was vital to me for reinventing myself after I left the newspaper industry full-time in 2019.

I had joined twitter in 2009 so I could tweet about Black Friday, which was still a thing back then. But in my hometown, Twitter has never been a mass media, so tweeting with a few hundred followers in those days was like hollering down a well. Pointless.

So for 10 years I used twitter like a lot of newspaper people: to tweet links to my stories and the stories of colleagues. To little effect, really, because Facebook sends many more readers to newspaper stories than Twitter.

But after slowing building my twitter reach to going on 3,000 followers, I took early retirement in 2019 and found myself wondering, “Now what?” That question applied to my use of twitter too. I didn’t have my own work to actively promote, but I could promote that of my friends and colleagues.

My writing partner and I were finishing up our third true crime book, “The Westside Park Murders,” that spring so that kept me busy. (The book was published by the History Press in 2021 after production delays due to the pandemic.) Then I began work on the first novel I’d written in nearly 20 years, “Seven Angels.” (The book won the 2021 Hugh Holton Award for Best Unpublished Crime Novel from Mystery Writers of America Midwest. It’s still out there, looking for a home.)

How does all this tie in to twitter?

I started using twitter not only as a way of promoting my own work, for sites like CrimeReads and, later, Daily Yonder and Gutter Review, but also making twitter friends with writers on the social media app. I actually have more twitter follows now than I did before I “retired.”

And we built a community. Not just the writers who i consider myself to actually know and who I speak with, but also some of the best and biggest writers, who I can exchange twitter pleasantries with. And not just politically active types but people who I know work to effect change.

Twitter lets a lot of people be themselves. That’s disastrous in some cases but infinitely rewarding in others.

I still think that twitter will survive, even if it goes away briefly. I think someone will rescue it and lift it up and return it to its status as the encouraging and infuriating place that it’s been.

I thought about tweeting this but decided to post it on this blog instead. Because twitter might go away and it is and always has been, like Facebook and Instagram and all the others, somebody else’s real estate.

We’re only renting space on social media, and it’s possible someone will come along and bulldoze that space.

But it’s possible someone will build a community all over again.

Because that’s what all of us have done all along. Build a community.