For those of my readers who aren’t up to the latest (and perhaps even most recently passed) technology, here’s a great video summary of Twitter and its benefits/dangers. It seems that most of the Twitter news I hear about is people making unwise comments about sensitive issues. These folks will make boneheaded comments that offend or show lack of sensitivity. The lack of discretion shouldn’t be as alarming as it seems. Our hearts are constantly thinking those thoughts, aren’t we? It’s just that the face to face, personal interactions act as a sort of filter by which we know we will be held accountable for what we say. It seems that that filter is absent when your comments have to be reduced to typing in less than 140 characters, yet the social pragmatics that govern the acceptability of such comments are still very much present.
Interestingly enough for me, I didn’t start ‘tweeting’ until I had data connectivity on my phone (perhaps a related phenomenon that attributes to Twitter’s (and Facebook’s for that matter, increased popularity?) Do you use Twitter? If so, what sort of internal or external guidelines do you use to determine what to (or what not to) tweet about?
If you don’t tweet, I’m sure you use Facebook. What kinds of things do you feel are acceptable to provide status updates about?