Twitter Is Real Life

...or if it's not, then maybe the Iowa State Fair was just a delicious hallucination.

Hello my dear newsletter readers! Welcome to my latest attempt to Do A Newsletter.

You will note that I have changed the overall newsletter title. This is my attempt to frame [waves arms] this all as what always wants to pour out of me anyway: what it’s like to be a journalist.

I mean, look: I’ve been doing this as a career for a little over a decade now, and I love my job [hi bosses!], and I still pinch myself that I now trade story ideas and reporting tips with people I admired from afar for so long. So…that’s one reason to write. But not only that...a huge, huge number of people distrust journalists and our profession. I figure, I will come out here and talk about how I do my job, how I feel about my work, and do my tiny tiny part of demystifying all this. 

Anyhow. This week’s banger -- and probably the next volume as well -- is all about Twitter. Let’s go.

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I approach tweeting with this kind of intensity. I hope I never change. (Gif source is HERE.)

The Pew Research Center put out a study this week showing the statistical contours of the Twitter populace. The finding that grabbed the most attention: a minority of Twitter users are responsible for the overwhelming majority of tweets.

John Gramlich @johngramlich

The sentiments you see expressed on Twitter come from a very small slice of the population, as a new @pewresearch study again makes clear. Only 23% of US adults use Twitter in the first place, and only 25% of *those* adults account for 97% of the tweets. pewrsr.ch/3Fk00D3

If you stop and think about it, this isn’t wildly unusual...this is probably the general statistical shape of most pastimes you can think of -- I would venture to guess that something like 1% of Americans are playing 95% of the Dungeons & Dragons, for example, or that 10% of people are doing 75% of the gardening.¹ And so on.

And yet. This study caused my Twitter timeline -- and perhaps yours -- to fill up with pretty much this tweet...on repeat:

Alex VanNess @thealexvanness

Twitter is not real life.

John Gramlich @johngramlich

The sentiments you see expressed on Twitter come from a very small slice of the population, as a new @pewresearch study again makes clear. Only 23% of US adults use Twitter in the first place, and only 25% of *those* adults account for 97% of the tweets. https://t.co/dEfQbBxai5 https://t.co/05vsiIp38K

This is not to pick on this Alex Van Ness person, who is just one of bajillions who came up when I searched Twitter for the phrase “Twitter is not real life” after this study published.²

And look: people I love and respect tweeted similar sentiments. And I do not want to insult or subtweet them. Everyone gets their own opinion. Rather, I’m going to voice my opinion here:

Twitter is very much real life.