Let us now turn to the important question of Why We Scroll.
Scrolling is probably the dominant user behavior on Twitter. It’s also a very poor way of doing any of the individual things Twitter is good at. News, for example: if you want news, the main feed is too scrambled and partial a sampling to be helpful—you’ll need to search for specific trustworthy accounts, search the topics you’re interested in, and so on. If you want to socialize, the messages from your friends will be drowned out by a bouquet of screeching.
So, why? I have a preposterous partial explanation: that scrolling is a form of divination, specifically a form of bibliomancy, in which you open a book to a random page and interpret your reality based on the text you find there.
Divination’s omnipresence suggests that it addresses a universal human need. Forms and styles vary across cultures, but it’s everywhere. Sometimes it’s something that a priestly class does, as with the dream interpretation of the Inuit shamans. Sometimes we can all join in—just about everybody casts lots in the Torah, and, in the present day, millions of people have Tarot apps, so they can divine at the bus stop.
However, the central methodology is the same in all cases—artistically interpret seemingly random bits from the universe, to get some sort of message about all the other random bits. Assuming there’s nothing mystical about it, this can seem like kind of a silly way to make sense of current events. But, on the other hand, how have we done lately when we trusted the Experts, the sources of non-random bits that we’re told to listen to? We probably would’ve done better on coronavirus if we’d examined the entrails of sacred animals, or one of the Shang dynasty’s oracle bones.
Twitter is what we have instead of the entrails of sacred animals. We open it up while we’re on the toilet. We get random squibs drawn from our followers. We take a general reading, come away with some vague sense of the world, and continue. Are we better for it, or worse? It’s hard to say—sometimes, Twitter has steered me well, and sometimes poorly.
However, Twitter has always given me the least possible benefit of divination, which is a pretty fucking good benefit: the illusion of control.
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If it saves innocent entrails, I will scroll. However, Tarot app may be even more random than a card shuffle but seems too far from any organic connection. I do have a tarot deck wrapped in satin and kept safe even though I claim no faith there. You do make a good case for Twitter divination maintaining the illusion of control. This illusion has been helpful.