more-in In mid-2010, I remember trying to explain to family, friends, and colleagues what my latest addiction was all about. “It’s a true social network, unlike Facebook,” I would patiently tell everyone, convinced that Twitter was some sort of breeding ground for perverts and sociopaths — not that I disagree entirely with this. “You follow and interact with people you don’t know. It’s not just about ‘adding’ friends; it’s about enhancing and changing your worldview.” Six years later, many things have changed. Many of ‘us’ i.e. those who were active on Twitter then have since lost their enthusiasm for the medium. Mind you, this doesn’t mean they’ve necessarily quit Twitter — on the contrary, some are more addicted to it than ever — but perhaps they won’t quite recommend it as enthusiastically today. A common refrain I hear from people I meet, many of whom I know because of Twitter, is how over it they are. I get where they’re coming from. It’s hard to imagine it today, but there was once a Twitter — I’m talking about the entity known as ‘Indian Twitter’ here, of course — that was full of smart, witty people sharing cool movie, music, and book recommendations all day long. This is not to say that those people have all migrated from Twitter, but to acknowledge that the topics of conversation that dominated it were, to put it mildly, different. We spent good chunks of work days playing silly ‘hashtag games’; for instance, a tremendous amount of time and energy was spent getting #TownieGirls to trend worldwide (#youremember). The old days We met each other offline and hung out. In Mumbai, we have Doolally Twitter; we had Karaoke Nights At Boat Club Twitter. People formed groups, dated, broke up, dated other people within the same group, broke up again, but remained within the social cluster. There’s a desi Paolo Sorrentino film waiting to be made about this. As the number of users grew, Indian Twitter changed to accommodate them and their views. First, the brands came for our hashtags. A certain sanctity was lost, a sense of innocence shattered when we saw our Twitter heroes and heroines selling out and ‘pimping’ brands out. Many got over that feeling soon enough, though, as the months leading to May 2014, the Lok Sabha elections, led to an overall politicisation of most of our timelines. Today, Twitter is a virtual town square that has been gentrified from wall to wall. It is used by the online English language media as both, a community of regular readers as well as highly intricate network of news sources. In the past two months, two tent-pole news events have placed Twitter in the brightest of spotlights when it comes to current affairs: first, the Amazon Canada doormat fiasco; second, the speech made by Trinamool Congress Member of Parliament Derek ‘O Brien in the Rajya Sabha, which spoke about how the Prime Minister of India follows many abusive trolls. It is also a place of sometimes-unwanted attention, perennial outraging, unbelievable vanity, and silent judgment. That’s the ‘high school’ side of it. Then there’s the side that has misogyny, harassment, abuse, and even threats. Despite the many design and tech upgrades — support for pictures, gifs, live videos, threads, polls — it’s no wonder we yearn for the good ol’ days. It has gone from being an admittedly elitist, self-obsessed bubble to a slightly more inclusive and political one that mirrors the actual demographics of the Indian Internet more closely. The other day, I found myself in the same predicament, having to explain to someone what the ‘point’ of Twitter was. I found myself parroting the same reply from mid-2010, because to me, they haven’t changed. Then that person asked me if they should sign up and create an account. I hesitated, and then replied, “Well, maybe you’re better off without it.” Suprateek Chatterjee is a Mumbai-based freelance journalist who primarily writes on film, music and popular culture

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