I was singled out this month in not one, but two rants against the Twitter essay, both by writers at the company formerly known as Gawker Media. In “Fuck Tweetstorms,” Deadspin’s Drew Magary accused me of “composing diarrheal tweetstorms virtually every day.” Pointing to my Twitter essay on Fidel Castro and Jaws, he asked, “Who the fuck is this for? How could anyone delude themselves into thinking anyone else could give a shit about reading this?” Alana Hope Levinson of Gizmodo, meanwhile, rechristened the Twitter essay as “manthreading”:

They are typically “intellectual” dribblings from men who love Explaining Things To Me (essentially a subtype of Online Mansplaining). These are people who want their ideas to take up the absolute most space possible. Like Manspreading, but of digital space.... Manthreading is when Jeet Heer, a senior editor at The New Republic, thinks people fucking vegetables warrants 21 points: 1. I want to talk about why Canadian fiction has so many stories about people having sex with animals & vegetables. — Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) September 17, 2016

I was not randomly targeted. While I didn’t invent the Twitter essay, I helped to popularize it, and now this curious form is so tied to my name that I’m afraid my gravestone will bear the marking “Jeet Heer, Twitter Essayist.”

There are worse epitaphs, though I suspect Magary and Levinson would disagree. They believe the Twitter essay is a futile, gratuitous, and narcissistic bid for attention—an assault, even, on the Twitter community. This characterization misunderstands not only this particular writing form, but the entire platform in question. Twitter is best used as a medium not for getting attention, but starting conversations.

I came late to Twitter, creating my account @heerjeet in 2012, long after the cool kids had become veterans. Twitter is a hands-on social media; it takes time to discern its rules of etiquette, and to learn the most effective way to make your point in 140 characters or fewer.

Within a few months, I found that Twitter worked best for me as a way of organizing my thoughts around events that were obsessing me. On May 16, 2013, Gawker revealed that Toronto Mayor Rob Ford had been videotaped smoking crack—but the tape itself wasn’t made public. Toronto was paralyzed by the mayor’s continued denial as well as his continued cycle of substance abuse combined with outbursts of racism, misogyny and homophobia. As I tried to figure out what this scandal said about the city, and about Canada, Twitter proved an invaluable way to air ideas and engage in conversations with people who were similarly perplexed. Influenced by the example of the conservative writer David Frum, I started to string my thoughts on Ford into numbered tweets—and eventually got advice from a follower on how to thread them so they could be read in sequence.