A reluctant twit
I can’t say as I’m a great fan of twitter. Part of that is my reflexive tendency to rebel against overhyped social media. Admittedly twitter isn’t the source of all evil in the world, like Facebook is, but the thought of millions of people around the world checking to see what Stephen Fry ate for breakfast this morning just makes me despair. The modern cult of celebrity irritates me profoundly and twitter has gotten itself all tied up in it.
Like text-messaging, certainly I can see the utility of the thing. Although (naturally) the number of pointless and inappropriate tweets appear to outnumber useful ones by a factor of several trillion. Twitter seems to encourage people to broadcast the minutiae of their lives to all and sundry… as though Facebook Status Updates had escaped from their rightful home and set up camp at another domain. I’ve also noticed an increasing trend of people attempting to have serious discussions via twitter. The ramifications of Sudanese partitioning simply can’t be debated in 140 characters or less. And doing so runs the risk of trivialising important issues.
That said, I’ve finally succumbed to the thing and become a reluctant twit. The lovely and wise Citizen S insists that it might help me widen the readership of this blog. I’m not at all sure that I really want to widen the readership of this blog, but if Citizen S says that “more people should be reading what you write about sustainability” then I shan’t argue. Whether or not twitter will help in that respect is yet to be discovered.
Anyhoo, if you fancy becoming one of my small band of disciples followers, then just click on that little button there and twitter will handle the rest.
God help us all.
UPDATE: Incidentally, what’s the etiquette with regards to “following”? If I start to follow someone’s twitter feed and discover it’s full of “my cat just did a big poo” type tweets, will my decision to stop following them be the equivalent of telling them to fuck off?
I don’t think it will be quite so emphatic as that, although they may well decide to stop following you in return. Blocking someone is pretty much the equivalent of telling them to fuck off, but that isn’t to do with your following them, it’s to do with them following you.
Congratulations, you are my 100th follower (actually my second 100th follower, as the first was a pornographic spambot, which I suspect you are not). Fortunately for me, there is no big cash prize.
April 7th, 2010 | 6:26pm
by Philip
As it happens, I applied to be a pornographic spambot but didn’t have the O’Levels.
April 7th, 2010 | 6:31pm
by Jim Bliss
My cat just did a big poo.
April 7th, 2010 | 7:53pm
by Larry Teabag
I would follow you but I don’t own a cat.
April 8th, 2010 | 1:12am
by R J Adams
Cat doing a big poo wouldn’t be so bad, at least all the details required to understand are present. It’s these fragmentary conversations no-one not privy to them can possibly understand without tracking down the starts and finishes of them only to discover they were not worth the bother that are the real rubbish of the medium. Twitter is like sitting down in a crowd of wankers and trying to take in all of their chatter all at once as if you are actually interested. Listen to the birds instead.
April 8th, 2010 | 6:12am
by Joel
On a
relatedtangentially relateddifferent subject, does anyone know if there’s any way to unlink from somebody on LinkedIn? (Not just a polite way, any way at all.) When I first got a profile I linked to more or less everyone who’d ever commented on any of my blogs, including the social networking technology blog I was running from work at the time. Two job changes later and I’m still linked to scads of social networking technology geeks, some of whom I don’t actually know at all.April 8th, 2010 | 10:28am
by Phil
Hey Phil. Log into LinkedIn. Click on ‘Contacts’ in the top navigation menu. The subnavigation on that page should now include an ‘Add Connections’ and ‘Remove Connections’ option.
Seeing as I don’t really use the site and have a grand total of two, count ‘ em, two connections I’ve never had to use this option. So I don’t know if it’s like Facebook’s “delete account (but not really)” facility.
Try it out though.
April 8th, 2010 | 10:41am
by Jim Bliss