Whilst I often don’t give it a second thought, Twitter has been a daily part of my life for eight years now, having joined the site in July of 2008. That’s over a third of my life (I’m 21 and joined when I was 13), and in that time I’ve tweeted over 30,000 times. Whilst I’ve never had many followers (I’ve been sitting on and around 200 for the last few months), this has never really bothered me, as I view the platform more as a microblog to post opinions, jokes, and reactionary content, shared mainly among a select few friends. But after over eight years of using the service, it’s crazy to think of just how much of my life is reflected through my profile.
Seeing as it’s possible to download your entire Twitter archive nowadays, I took it upon myself to download it and have a gander at my tweeting history. My first tweet, for the record, was on the 9th of July 2008, and it reads, “Hi i just started Twitter its pretty cool.” Pretty solid first tweet, I think, and the punctuation issues are pretty tame compared to later teenage tweets. See, the way I see it, my Twitter history can be broken up into four eras:
Obnoxious Teen
I’ll say that this era runs roughly from 2008 to 2009. It contains gems such as “W00T! GO OBAMA! WOO WOO WOO! FTW!”, “anyone online plz message me”, and my personal favourite, “im feeling random. pickles nad onions are good for hyour rabbit munching jewels.” It’s somewhat alarming to me that these are the foundations upon which my Twitter account is built.
Sixteen Year Old Superhero
Around 2010 – 2011, I began to develop what I believed to be the concrete foundations of my philosophical beliefs. This mainly entailed pacifism and world peace, and whilst these are still ideals that I believe in, I’m nowhere near as unshakeable in my beliefs as I was back then. Part of me honestly believed that through my writing, I’d be able to convince everybody that hatred was a bad thing and that there was no need for violence, anywhere, ever again. Tweets such as “Today is such a beautiful day :)” were commonplace, as well as out-of-context song lyrics to convey some sort of deep emotional tone to those reading my timeline (e.g “Let’s waste time, chasing cars…”). In fact, if I found myself making the tweet, “Seeing as I’ve been so depressed as of late, I’m making a “Sad Songs” playlist on Youtube. Feel free to take a gander when I make it public”, I’d probably have to give myself a good old slap in the face. But this directly leads into my next ‘era’.
Oversharing Whingebag
Starting around 2012 and ending in 2013, I went through a dark time in my life. And that’s okay, I’m not here to criticise myself for unavoidable emotions. I am here, however, to criticise the dreadful amounts of oversharing that took place on my Twitter account during that time. I’d always been a bit of an oversharing person on my account, but it escalated to entirely new levels. Mopey, out-of-context tweets like “I dread to think how I’ll feel when I’m out of distractions…” were not just common but rampant, and I pretty much spent the entire time walking around crying ‘woe is me’.
I can safely say that early in 2013, I began feeling much better, and this was reflected in more humorous tweets such as, “Strumming my cat like a guitar” / “She seems to enjoy this situation so I think I’ll stop” / “Weird cat, what the hell is wrong with you” / “You’re not a guitar, cat.”
Now
I’m a firm believer that you can’t define an era of time whilst you’re still inside it. It’s like zooming out from a big picture. The only description I can really give my modern-day Twitter account is baseless comedy, some gaming talk and a bit of nihilistic meming thrown in there for future self-loathing sessions. I’ve also used Twitter as more of an interactive means of contacting and laughing with friends, since I met more people at uni who use the service. I’ve put a conscious stop to the oversharing (which was a difficult habit to break at first) and whilst I do spout a lot of unrelated and often profane crap, I like to think that I’m worth a follow. I certainly keep myself amused, at any rate.
In the last few years I’ve also become an avid WoW player, so much so that I made a separate Twitter account for it so that I don’t flood my current account with content that the vast majority of my followers won’t understand or be interested in.