Holiday-Travel Twitter Is the Best Form of Social Media

Whenever one of my friends tweets that they’re at (or on their way to, or getting ready to go to) the airport, I start refreshing their Twitter to see if anything has gone wrong. The only good kind of Twitter, maybe the only good kind of social media, that remains is Travel Twitter. And Travel Twitter gets better the more things go wrong for the tweeters.

Twitter, like so much of the internet’s social corners is full of trolls, toxic arguments, and self-promotion, by turns distressing and mind-numbing. But around the holidays is still the best time for social media, when all of these little oversaturated digital playgrounds get briefly more bearable. Holiday Twitter is the best Twitter because Holiday Twitter contains the highest per-capita occurrence of Travel Twitter (which includes the sub-categories of Airport Twitter and Megabus Twitter and Train Twitter (especially Quiet Car Twitter) and Rental Car Twitter).

I used to love social media, which is how I ended allowed us to recreationally spy on celebrities, and social media took this permission one step further, making it acceptable to spy on our friends. Our friends rarely do anything very interesting (neither do celebrities), but that was exactly what was so compelling.