The Twitter Paradox

A few months ago I started following my Twitter feed as a way of easing myself out of the news blackout I had self imposed last November. My thinking was that taking news in 140-character bites would protect me from the bubble I ended up in after watching cable news 24/7 leading up to the election. In due time, however, I learned that there’s rampant bubbling taking place on Twitter as well, though I’m better able to observe it now than be consumed by it.
My main observation is that Twitter is a hotbed of what Daniel Kahneman describes as System 1 thinking in his essential book, Thinking Fast and Slow. As Kahneman insists throughout his book, there is not a value difference between System 1 and System 2 thinking. They’re just different and both have their place in human decision making, like low gear and high gear have different functions in operating a car. There’s nothing wrong with high gear; it’s just that if you use it in trying to climb a steep hill, you’re misusing it.
System 1 is our brain’s high gear…it gets us to decisions fast. Without that ability to make quick decisions, our species’ chances of survival would’ve been iffy given how much faster, stronger, and instinctive so many creatures around us are. Still, System 1 thinking is not without its drawbacks. The most serious is that it often prevents us from employing our more deliberative, rational, less emotional, System 2 brain. Because Twitter consists almost entirely of pure, uncut System 1 thoughts, it resembles that psychological game where patients are asked to say the first thing that comes to their minds when they hear the word…what word? Take your pick: race, rape, rage, Hillary, Russia, healthcare, Trump, OJ, Bernie bro, sexist, slut, slob, Pablo Sandoval. On Twitter you literally get to watch people following the news and instantly registering their gut reaction to it…their System 1 on steroids.
This past week gave a sobering example of the negative effect of this dynamic. HBO announced that the creators of Game of Throneswould next be producing a series called Confederate based on the premise of what if the South had won the Civil War. There’s a long tradition of such imaginings not only in fiction, but in academia as well. Sitting on my bookshelf is a fascinating history called What if wherein a number of scholars tackle the intriguing questions of what would the world be like if significant historical events had gone otherwise. Yet the Twitter reaction to Confederate was all Sturm und Drang…and this howling came most forcefully from my tribesmen on the political left. They accused HBO of trying to placate the neo-Confederates who walk among us with increasing swagger; they screamed How dare they? about the two white guys hired to tell a story about slavery; they wailed about the most tragic episode in American history being turned over to entertainers who freely traffic in sex, blood and dragons. This hue and cry rose up from the ranks of liberals who pride themselves on understanding nuance, appreciating patience, grounding themselves in reality. Yet here they were sounding every bit as hysterical as Evangelicals did years ago when Martin Scorsese announced he would be making Nikos Kazantzakis’s masterpiece, The Last Temptation of Christ, into a movie.
This is a direct result of Twitter of course.  I truly doubt that any of those from the fields of politics, punditry and sports (!) who tweeted ominously about the coming of Confederate would’ve done so without Twitter. Their interest in an upcoming TV show (and upcoming in years, not days) would’ve been nil. But Twitter gave them a means to act on a random impulse and find instant gratification for a passing aggravation. In that System 1 instant, ironically, they were mimicking a US President who they rightly mock and disparage daily for constantly giving into his impulses on Twitter.
I’m not much of one for bemoaning the evolutionary stages of human communication. Yes, the written word replaced the oral tradition and cost us some great storytelling around the campfire. And, yes, the printing press gave everyone the ability to take a book into their own private corner and killed off reading to others. And cell phones and Internet and Instagram are all changing the way we communicate before our very eyes and ears…and as Marshall McLuhan brilliantly revealed, changes in the media of communication bring changes in the meanings of communication. And so we shouldn’t be all that shocked when Twitter turns even the most thoughtful among us into System 1 shoot-from-the-hip gunslingers with opinions about a TV show that hasn't even been written yet.   
What’s more unsettling is the lack of awareness about the whole process and its import for our times. With Kahneman and his late partner Amos Tversky, we had a team as powerful in the realm of critical thinking that we would've had if Einstein and Hawking had teamed up in physics. The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Minds by Michael Lewis shows how Kahneman and Tversky’s research over 50 years undid old ideas and discovered new realities about how humans think. Their truly revolutionary findings have made profound impact in the areas of medicine, psychology, military, economics, and sport. Where their influence is notably and sadly lacking is in education, government and media. Unscientifically, I’ll claim that those three areas generate the most Twitter activity. That’s part of the Twitter paradox…the more it is used, the more its users have to subjugate their System 2 minds to their System 1 minds, thus diminishing the power of the former and enhancing that of the latter.

The other part of the paradox is that a great deal of Donald Trump’s appeal to his base is the unfiltered view they get of him through his Tweets. A recent poll suggests that the country as a whole is less enamored of his Tweet habit than his base is, but that's  mostly because they find it distracting. His base has shown consistently since his profile first went national that they like the way he says things even more than they like (or even care) about what he says. There’s the more important message for those with designs on changing the recent course of our political history and making America sane again. That message is not that “the resistance” needs better logos or ideological purity, but that it needs to communicate better to the System 1 mindset--which means less manufacturing, focus group testing of System 2 bullshit aimed at the impossible goal of pleasing everyone.
More to come on this...until then, The Nob invites you to sing along with the birdies...