Benjamin Sire is a composer and journalist.
Almost every day our journalistic-political microcosm is in turmoil in the face of the controversy that emerges in the Twitter trend, and of which we are often the initiators.
Immediately the retweet and comment machine goes into action.
We make the phenomenon grow, before delivering this ephemeral outgrowth to various sagacities.
This inevitably has the consequence of amplifying the buzz in question ... and of leading us to analyze it again, which still nourishes it, making us believe in its importance when it is most often very relative .
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If such a circle could produce watts, the environmental issue would be partly resolved and fossil fuels would no longer be of any use to us.
Unfortunately babbling does not necessarily turn power stations and the web has a very culpable carbon footprint.
Twitter is the essence of our hubris.
Among colleagues, we decide what deserves to be mentioned, what matters little to us, such as elements likely to fuel our notoriety, but also the love or hatred that we arouse.
The grace of an algorithm, little concerned with democracy and bowing only to the service of the influencers that we imagine to be, leads the crowd of more or less anonymous Internet users to transform our itching of information into torrents or streams.
We then resemble Leonardo Di Caprio, arms outstretched, shouting: "
I am the master of the world
", facing the ocean, held by the rail ... of the Titanic: feeling of all power on the surface of the shipwreck.
Title putaclic slowly turned into a tweet whore, to fuel the emptiness of the buzz
A qualifier was born at the beginning of the flowering of online news sites, then social networks: putaclic.
What originally concerned exclusively the titles of certain publications whose content, unlike their advertisement, was not alluring, slowly moved to the blue bird network.
It is now no longer the ads in "
Guess the incredible adventure lived by thing thing
"
mode
that eye the pangs of prostitution, but all of us.
Title putaclic slowly turned into a tweet whore, to fuel the emptiness of the buzz.
And here we are, proud to count our likes, to compare our impressions, to begin to vibrate each time they reach a few hundred thousand or several millions for the most prominent among us.
This phenomenon obviously does not only affect journalists and politicians, but it is much more exacerbated in these professions where the number of listeners, readers and votes decides the stop or even the person.
The famous médiamétrie index in charge of measuring the audience of television shows has moved intuitu personæ and distorts the game by focusing on buzz, subjects flattering our reptilian brain, conflicts and humiliations, of which the transmitter can profit or be the victim.
And we all fall into the trap that we set for ourselves and which represents the caricatured mirror of a world where liberalism, individualism and digital have joined hands, which we have already spoken of several times in these columns. .
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We could laugh at it and say fatalistic with a shrug of the shoulders: "
So the world goes."
It is not all that bad.
Everything to the ego of the networks absorbs us all, so be it
”.
Except that in fact, the thing is by no means trivial and its consequences are multiple.
The main one is to lock us up in a fictitious universe that takes us further and further away from a common citizen of which we are nevertheless part.
However, this simple fact leads us to bear a heavy responsibility in societal disorders.
By dint of looping on Twitter, making it the alpha and omega of what we envision the way the world is going, we never stop missing out on a significant part of reality and undoubtedly its most fundamental part.
Worse, we are dragging in our wake a part of the population and naive decision-makers who thus turn their backs on the concrete to give in to the sirens of a world of avatars.
The worst is that our famous concerns are even in the minority on the minority Twitter network!
They therefore weigh nothing!
However, in this period when mistrust of journalists, politicians and intermediaries has never been so strong, this attitude is quite simply unconscious.
The picture we make of our importance and our priorities in no way corresponds to that of the vast majority of French people who then throw themselves as much towards abstention as towards the various forms of populism and all those who, that regardless of their obedience, promise to clean up ourselves.
Often on the basis of a correct observation and disastrous solutions.
But the worst is that our famous concerns are even in the minority on the minority Twitter network!
They therefore weigh nothing!
To be convinced of this, we must establish the differential between Twitter and the country, this analysis can also be done in many other nations.
In 2019, France had 67 million inhabitants (66.99 million to be precise - Insee).
Of this total, 12.9 million people have an active Twitter account and just over 4 million use it daily.
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The proportion of users according to age is roughly equivalent for all the classes analyzed, ranging between 22, 25 and 20% from 18 to 54 years old, with the exception of those over 55 who do not represent than 9% of active tweeters.
In the first place, this means that 54 million French people are totally ignorant of the words peddled by the little blue bird.
Secondly, it indicates that we are not talking to seniors who nevertheless represent one of the most active parts of the electorate.
This somewhat undermines our idea of the importance of the discussions and information that is disseminated on the network.
In comparison, Facebook has 38 million active users each month in France and the Figaro site records more than 24.5 million unique visitors.
Then, while the political and journalistic buzz gives us the impression that they are the quintessence of the network, they are not actually among the top 10 areas of interest of the French.
And this is measured when we have done a daily analysis of the trends that appear on our accounts.
Which tweeters (...) was not amazed to see the latest information on Korean pop (...) appear on top of the famous TTs?
Thus, some topics commonly steal the show from others.
In the first place, those dealing with music.
What twittos, unlike yours truly whose profession it is, was not amazed to see the top of the famous TTs, the latest news about Korean pop that teenagers love and most adults love. ignore everything?
It is the same for the last mixtape of this or that rapper or the escapades of one of them.
The second most important concern is video games, immediately followed by travel, food (not to say cooking), and sport.
Thus, each day of Ligue 1 or of the English Premier League trustees almost all TT, in France as elsewhere, relegating societal or political information to the bottom of the grid.
For example, the comments relating to Emmanuel Macron's last intervention on the health crisis had only generated a little more than 60,000 tweets after a few hours, when, the day before, the absence of the name of the former footballer Thierry Henry of an insignificant ranking of the best players of the 21st century had generated more than 200,000.
To read also:
Thierry Henry: "My team fought to the end" (video)
It is the same, and this time more logically, for the death of a famous personality, whatever his field of practice.
Thus, the information that we give and whose deliverance we believe to be crucial can only make its way through when Korean twinks, bodybuilder rappers or footballers on fire or lacking inspiration, give us the leisure to express ourselves.
The more or less serious information, ranging from the notorious evolution of a conflict to the blunder of a half-celebrity pricking itself of politics, is an adjustment variable in an ocean of futility which ends up contaminating it.
Now let's play a little game together.
You, reader of these lines, whose promotion will be partly ensured by Twitter where you have an account, have fun taking up one of the great political subjects which all the press and the political microcosm will have done its best online these recently, with the exception of the health crisis which concerns us all, and to talk about it around you.
We therefore feed a Lilliputian machine that we look at through the prism of a distorting mirror giving us the feeling of contemplating a mountain
Not with your comrades in the network, but in your family, at your work, at the tobacco shop, at the supermarket, or wherever you want, despite a confinement having the fault of depriving us of this essential sociability.
You will be surprised to find that a considerable part of your relationships will have no idea what you are talking about, even though you are convinced that it is the hot topic of the moment.
To assert this, we have lent ourselves to the exercise.
Formidable.
The same distortion of reality concerns television series.
In our small environment where journalists, communicators and politicians clash, programs like
Baron Noir
,
House of Cards
,
The West Wing
or
Le bureau des Légendes
(despite its real export success), feed a good part of the network conversations.
Read also:
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However, they do not appear at the top of the series notoriety ranking revealed by an Ifop study, just published.
The first of them,
The office of legends
, ranks in 20th position, being known by name only by 35% of those questioned, and obtains a qualitative score of just over 5 out of 10, just like the others. series evoking political themes in the broad sense.
And yet, this is a program dealing with much more espionage and adventure than pure politics.
We therefore feed a Lilliputian machine that we look at through the prism of a distorting mirror giving us the feeling of contemplating a mountain.
This principle is further amplified by the operation of the Twitter algorithm which analyzes our main areas of interest and is more or less generous in impressions, depending on whether we tweet about it or on subjects we are not familiar with.
Watch out for tweeters who want to be generalist and tweet about everything and nothing.
He will most often be ignored by an algorithm unable to determine the potential recipients of his chatter
Thus, when a journalist specializing in left movements becomes a first basketball analyst, his tweet will have a good chance of getting lost in the meanders of the network, while his last good word about a second France Insoumise will be widely printed.
Watch out for tweeters who want to be generalist and tweet about everything and nothing.
More often than not, he will be ignored by an algorithm unable to determine the potential recipients of his chatter.
The other danger of the network, based on a good understanding of the principle stated above, lies, for its part, in its occupation by a crowd of hyper active militants once again giving a false idea of the reality of political balances. and topics that citizens genuinely care about.
Here again, the phenomenon is not new, but it tends to gain in importance.
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Thus, during the 2007 presidential campaign, the first to have eyed (timidly) the web to guide the votes of the French, several online polls had been proposed by various issuers, ranging from news sites to political movements.
Most of them gave a large victory to Jean-Marie Le Pen, generally followed by Olivier Besancenot.
Now let us remember the real scores of the two candidates in question on the evening of the first round, April 22, 2007;
10.44% for the first and 4.08% for the second.
It is even the ballot where, after his victory, Nicolas Sarkozy was able to be proud of having "
siphoned off the votes of the National Front
".
We are still there, but in a more assertive way, and the items which appear to be fundamental in the eyes of the journalistic and political microcosms of Twitter, are often only sham, even if they end up exerting an influence on society by being more widely taken up by other types of media which, in turn, move away from the reality of citizens.
"A militant elite makes rain and shine on Twitter and the rest of the population does not understand what is happening, when they do not simply ignore it"
Antonin Congy
Thus, as the academic Antonin Congy says: “
Democracy is partly confiscated by professional activists who perfectly master social networks and dictate their political agenda.
It is one of the major crises of our time.
A militant elite makes rain and shine on Twitter and the rest of the population doesn't understand what is going on, when they don't quite simply ignore it.
The dropout is incredibly violent.
On this subject as on all societal and political issues, this gives, on the one hand, a strong discrepancy that can generate resentment, and on the other, that of activists, an insatiable thirst for power.
Hubris again.
When the entire political twittosphere is convinced that personalities like Taha Bouhafs, Rokhaya Diallo or, in an opposite camp, Damien Rieu or Jean Messiha, are essential notabilities, most citizens ignore their existence.
The same goes for the subjects they cover (racialism, identity claims, cancel culture, etc.), which although regularly appearing at the top of political Twitter trends are not among the subjects that citizens care about the most, even if young people are more sensitive to it.
And this despite the incessant bridge erected between Twitter and the 24-hour news channels, where some of these characters and themes have their entries or are often cited.
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But there again, despite the catchphrase proper to the term "
seen on TV
", the reality of the audience of these channels is not very flattering.
Thus, before the arrival of the coronavirus which boosted their audiences, none of them exceeded 1% market share, with the exception of BFM TV, which, excluding exceptional events, peaked at 3%.
These figures have certainly been multiplied by 2 by the grace of confinements, but it is a safe bet that they will more or less regain their previous threshold when the health crisis has passed.
Thus, through Twitter and 24-hour news channels, we constantly give disproportionate importance to phenomena, subjects and personalities who not only in reality struggle to find their way into the collective imagination. , but cuts us off from it, further widening the already abysmal gap between citizens and their political representatives, as well as the media.
With these words, it remains for us to tweet this article to feed a little more the network chatter that he denounces ...