I think I’m about to coin a new phrase, here. I say that because it hasn’t been coined elsewhere, to my knowledge. And, though I’m sure I’m not the first to wonder about this, I’d like to think that I’m the first person to label it. So, get ready. Seriously, this is going to be monumental. Here’s the new term that I’m sure will leap from the pages of this blog and into the dictionary by next year:
Psychological Tweeting.
Okay, well, that sounded a bit more magnificent in my head, but there you have it. In any case, here’s my idea behind the concept.
I was entertaining a family member who’s visiting from out of town this week, and we were outside of a major business that has a presence in our city. She commented on the landscaping. You see, she’s from New England, where there’s a different approach to landscaping. Here in the Southeast, landscaping is done for more aesthetic reasons, I think, to improve business and make something look like something more than a business. Her point was that this landscaping was not done with the health of the tree in mind, and she launched into a long explanation about how the mulch had been heaped around the base of the tree too high…I’m not even going to pretend to understand.
My point is that there’s a culture of appearance management here, and its not just confined to the Southeast, but present throughout the U.S. Its about the surface gloss, the veneer, the appearance of a thing, or of a person. Style over substance, and maddeningly so. That’s why we do things like “create brands,” and “control our social media presence.” When we’re trying to emphasize certain aspects of ourselves, we phrase our resumes a bit differently. Our LinkedIn profiles may look more like what we want to be doing than what we actually are doing. This isn’t new, but its exaggerated to an exponential degree, now. With a bit of snazzy verbal manipulation, I can make a reader think that something is much cooler than it is. I’m not saying that’s ethically correct in a marketing sense…certainly, I believe otherwise. However, in a culture where absolutely everything is for sale, we’re marketing ourselves to each other. So, for example, writers tweet about writing. Even though I still have a work in progress and not a finished novel, I tweet about writing it. This is because, the reasoning goes, when I’m ready to begin marketing the novel, I’ll already have followers interested.
Of course, that’s not the only reason…or even the primary reason…artists and creatives use social networks. In fact, I think a lot of it is to help assuage our own fears. The first time I sat down and typed out my entire CV, I thought, “I don’t look bad on paper at all once you have everything there!” That was important for me, because I needed to see that for myself, to be encouraged like that. When I put together the list of works I’ve had published lately on my LinkedIn profile, I remembered little publications and projects that I had forgotten, but that add to my experience. So, when I’m writing, sometimes its very important for me to tweet that I’m writing in order to feel like I’m truly engaging in the activity. And, because I’m human, sometimes I make it sound more glamorous than it is…not because I’m trying to wow somebody with how cool I am (writing is entirely unglamorous, I assure you), but rather because I need to believe for myself that this is really cool, and not just the hopeless feeling that gets wrapped in the monotony of trying to work through the scene that is suddenly giving me fits.
So, my tweet about “solving a plot inconsistency with a bit of world building” really amounts to the fact that I realized the setting wouldn’t let my characters get from point A to point B, but that the plot revolved around them succeeding, so I needed to ease up on the setting restrictions. Still, saying it the way I tweeted it just sounds…cooler. It makes me feel better about what I’m doing. You know, like positive self-talk. Self-validation. Psychological things like that.
So, its psychological tweeting. Because I need to feel like what I’m doing in that moment is worthwhile, because sometimes I don’t, even if I know cognitively that it is, in fact, important.
Psychological tweeting. Another way that social media has altered our cultural landscape, both internal and external.
Psychological tweeting. You heard it here first.