Signs and symptoms of poster's disease...

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“Poster’s disease,” as a concept, has been drifting in the air for at least a few years, but — like another popular and unrelenting illness — it first entered my consciousness in 2020. Since then, someone afflicted with poster’s disease has popped up on my radar anywhere from every few weeks to every few days. It has become a catch-all phrase for bad tweets that I don’t want to read, a flashing warning sign to look away from the wreckage on my timeline. But, rather than seeing this affliction as a cautionary tale to disengage, over the course of the past year I have become unduly fascinated by it. Was poster’s disease a malady of quantity or quality? Was it a blight on the blue check elite or the commonplace user? Was logging off a cure, or did it only enhance its posters’ (and readers’) suffering? What follows is my attempt to develop a working definition — a diagnosis, to be clear — of what exactly poster’s disease is.

In order to define poster’s disease, I must first develop a framework to understand the nature of posting. Along that line of inquiry, perhaps it is best to begin by delineating poster’s disease in the context of what it is not. Poster’s disease, for example, is not the same as being “terminally online,” although both share medical lexicon in their nomenclature. Terminally online is synonymous with never logging off. A terminally online person checks the posts first thing in the morning and last thing before they go to bed. They check the posts in the middle of the night if they wake up to pee. They keep Twitter, Instagram, any of it, all of it, in tabs pinned and unclosed on their computer and phone. That is the condition of being terminally online. It is not necessarily the same as posting.

Poster’s disease is also not “main character syndrome,” though this is a much closer approximation of the issue. Main character syndrome is the novelization of the self online, the belief that you are the hero of your world. You are important! Your thoughts have value! Sure, they do, a little bit, to those who care about you. But main character syndrome is the centering of the ego under the guise of self-care. Main character syndrome is believing that it’s okay to tell someone you’re at capacity for being their friend, but they can try again in six months after you’ve had some R&R. (Someone with poster’s disease would continue to be their friend, but complain about it in the form of passive-aggressive subtweets.) Poster’s disease is not directly a type of sociopathy, as I would argue main character syndrome is, but rather, a compulsive behavior to say something, anything, truly whatever, in response to something else (or worse: nothing else).


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https://www.gawker.com/media/posters-disease