When I was still promoting my published writings, I remember often — quite often — getting replies or quote-tweets from people who had no idea what I was saying but wanted to comment on it in a way that corroborated or reinforced their sense of themselves, their social self-presentation, a social self-presentation that typically took the form of performative partisan self-righteousness. Most of them hadn’t read my work, of course; they had only seen a tweet (by me or by someone else) about something I had published. But even when they read it they didn’t understand: my ideas came from a place so distant from their intellectual and personal formation that those ideas were unintelligible to them. But still they commented.
Alan Jacobs darüber, warum es manchmal besser sein kann, weniger Menschen zu erreichen: Pos, Not Posse