This article is from the source 'nytimes' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
You can find the current article at its original source at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/magazine/twitter-dying.html
The article has changed 6 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.
| Version 4 | Version 5 |
|---|---|
| What Was Twitter, Anyway? | What Was Twitter, Anyway? |
| (2 days later) | |
| The trouble began, as it usually does, when I saw something funny on my computer. It was the middle of the morning on a Wednesday, a few years back, and I came across news that Le Creuset, the French cookware brand, had made a line of “Star Wars”-themed pots and pans. There was a roaster made to look like Han Solo frozen in carbonite ($450) and a Dutch oven with Tatooine’s twin suns on it (“Our Dutch oven promises an end result that’s anything but dry — unlike the sun-scorched lands of Tatooine”; $900). A set of mini cocottes had been decorated to resemble the lovable droid characters C-3PO, R2-D2 and BB-8. | The trouble began, as it usually does, when I saw something funny on my computer. It was the middle of the morning on a Wednesday, a few years back, and I came across news that Le Creuset, the French cookware brand, had made a line of “Star Wars”-themed pots and pans. There was a roaster made to look like Han Solo frozen in carbonite ($450) and a Dutch oven with Tatooine’s twin suns on it (“Our Dutch oven promises an end result that’s anything but dry — unlike the sun-scorched lands of Tatooine”; $900). A set of mini cocottes had been decorated to resemble the lovable droid characters C-3PO, R2-D2 and BB-8. |
| I was also looking at Twitter that day, something that I can say for sure not only because of what happened next, but also because I look at Twitter just about every day. (This is not terribly unusual in my profession — I am an editor at The New York Times Magazine — but I think it should be stated clearly upfront that I have something of an acute problem with it.) I took a screenshot of the cocottes and uploaded it to the site. I wrote, as an accompanying caption, “The Star Wars/Le Creuset pots imply the existence of a Type of Guy I find genuinely unimaginable...” — just like that, ellipsis and all. I hit send. I guess I went back to work after that. My email records show that I sent a big edit memo to a writer. Then, around lunchtime, things started happening. | I was also looking at Twitter that day, something that I can say for sure not only because of what happened next, but also because I look at Twitter just about every day. (This is not terribly unusual in my profession — I am an editor at The New York Times Magazine — but I think it should be stated clearly upfront that I have something of an acute problem with it.) I took a screenshot of the cocottes and uploaded it to the site. I wrote, as an accompanying caption, “The Star Wars/Le Creuset pots imply the existence of a Type of Guy I find genuinely unimaginable...” — just like that, ellipsis and all. I hit send. I guess I went back to work after that. My email records show that I sent a big edit memo to a writer. Then, around lunchtime, things started happening. |
| If you don’t use Twitter — which is perfectly normal; about three-quarters of Americans don’t — you should know that the platform has a function called quote-tweeting, which was introduced in 2015. It allows users to show a tweet they’ve encountered to their own followers, while adding their own text or image to comment on it. You often see people use this function to respond to some contrived prompt that crosses their feed (“What’s a great song that features an impressive horn section?”). Less often, though often enough that the practice has its own name, quote-tweets are used to roast and clown on people — to trot them out in front of a new audience, drop their pants and spank them. This is referred to as “dunking.” | If you don’t use Twitter — which is perfectly normal; about three-quarters of Americans don’t — you should know that the platform has a function called quote-tweeting, which was introduced in 2015. It allows users to show a tweet they’ve encountered to their own followers, while adding their own text or image to comment on it. You often see people use this function to respond to some contrived prompt that crosses their feed (“What’s a great song that features an impressive horn section?”). Less often, though often enough that the practice has its own name, quote-tweets are used to roast and clown on people — to trot them out in front of a new audience, drop their pants and spank them. This is referred to as “dunking.” |
| At some point in the early afternoon, someone dunked on me by quote-tweeting my observation and adding, in The Onion’s headline style: “Area Man Has Never Heard of Women.” My post was now in front of a new audience, and that audience was now reading it framed by what I would consider an uncharitable interpretation of my point. | At some point in the early afternoon, someone dunked on me by quote-tweeting my observation and adding, in The Onion’s headline style: “Area Man Has Never Heard of Women.” My post was now in front of a new audience, and that audience was now reading it framed by what I would consider an uncharitable interpretation of my point. |
| New quote-tweets started to pour in, each one putting me in front of another audience of followers, some minuscule and others quite large. “I enjoyed that this tweet manages to be sexist on multiple levels”; “#newsflash WOMEN cook and like Star Wars”; “Imagine a woman”; “Hi, have you met women?”; “Women like Star Wars. Men cook.”; “My husband is a huge Star Wars fan and is the cook in the house. He bakes too. Sorry to blow your mind.”; “i luv a good dose of homophobia and toxic masculinity in the year of our lord 2019 🙄.” My notifications flooded for the next 24 hours as the tweet continued to find its way into new corners of the site. Some people replied directly: “... are you aware that girls can like star wars too”; “Willy, get a better imagination, and cut it out with the gatekeeping”; “Men cook. Women like Star Wars. If you can’t imagine those things, that’s about you, not other people.”; “Showed my son, he’s trying to find them to order them now. Btw, he’s a Marine.” Other replies can’t be printed here. | |
| None of these people were wrong, exactly. It was true that in the split second between learning of the pots and posting about them, I had imagined a stereotypically geeky and slovenly guy as the customer, and Le Creuset as the kind of thing you put on your wedding registry — that is indeed why I thought the products were funny. It’s not as if this was a terribly original thought; I didn’t wake up and introduce to our culture, on a random Wednesday, the idea that male nerds like to buy “Star Wars” memorabilia. Nor had these broader gender corollaries — that men don’t cook, that women don’t like “Star Wars” — so much as crossed my mind. In any event, I no longer have any trouble imagining what “Star Wars”-Le Creuset customers are like. |