Monday 2 January 2012

Will I still be tweeting in 2013?


A new phenomenon has occurred in my Twitter timeline of late. These are tweets from people I don’t follow that are labelled ‘Promoted Tweets’. When I see one, I block the sender. At present, they are rare enough for this to be only mildly irritating. But, as someone who remembers email in the days before spam (well, actually, I remember the days before email, and even the days before personal computers...), I worry that things could change fast.
When discussing Twitter with fellow academics, one thing they always ask is whether it isn’t just another tedious thing that you have to wade through, like email. Email is currently the curse of academics everywhere: in her New Year’s blogpost, Athene Donald noted her resolution to delete spam emails unread first thing in the day, and commentators on her blog clearly resonate to this, as I do. I have been cheerfully telling people that the wonderful thing about Twitter is that you only get messages from people you choose to follow, and it's not at all like email. Other people can’t get at you. Well, they can, a bit, in that they can get into your ‘mentions’ list by mentioning you, but your timeline has always been totally under your control. But the folks at Twitter have other plans, as explained here.
Needless to say, Twitter is a business. It’s not my God-given right to have a free Twitter account. If I engage with the system, I need to play by its rules. But I really am not that addicted. To me, having to fend off people who want my time, money or attention is extremely tedious. Twitter has been a delight precisely because it has been virtually free of such irritants. Make Twitter more like email, and I will just leave. Really.

2 comments:

  1. Could not agree more, I have been experiencing/concluding the same myself recently. Filtering is valuable, especially when one can do it oneself and not have it rudely interrupted.

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  2. I guess I'm a Luddite, but I don't tweet, I don't do text messages, I don't have a television, I don't even have a radio.

    My role models are folks like Henry David Thoreau, with his solitary experiences at Walden Pond, and Charles Darwin, with his remote travels on the Beagle.

    Thoreau and Darwin didn't have, or need, immediate followers, yet their writings will be read for millenia.

    Twitter ... who needs that distraction?

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