In the early hours of this morning, my son Mike tweeted this expletive-laced apology to his Twitter Community.
You can only imagine my pride.
Being a stickler for manners, I was happy to see that Mike thought his overuse of Twitter was worth an apology. But as a web-and-smartphone Twitter user I wasn’t sure what he was apologizing for; I never saw the 133 tweets he referred to—because, let’s face it, most of your tweets are never seen by most of your followers.
And then it hit me: I’ve always hated texting. And now I see a new reason to hate it.
Never having been in that demographic, it hadn’t registered for me that people who use Twitter via text see all the tweets from all the people they follow unless they take steps to change what Twitter shows them. And they see those tweets One. Text. Message. At. A. Time.
Assuming I counted them correctly, that annoying paragraph was how many messages Mike was apologizing for. And while you could skip over that paragraph of “text”s, Mike’s text-using Twitter followers had no such option.
This made me think of the many issues that social networking without understanding what you’re doing and why you’re doing it kicks up.
- Swearing in writing just isn’t necessary unless the bad words add context. Swearing in e-mail is a bad idea, too.
- Say the wrong things on Twitter, and you could get sued; Twitter isn’t your living room.
- Just because you can say anything you like on Twitter doesn’t mean you should.
- And for goodness’ sake, Social Networking is not a substitute for speaking.
Short message complete. Carry on …
