What Twitter Is: Remedial Version
I am doing my daily “let’s go through the news so I don’t get behind” thing, when I notice a story at Politico about poor capitol hill staffers upset that a group called LegiStorm listed their Twitter accounts.
“?!!?” says I.
One of my personal pet peeves is people who get pissed at the wrong thing. There is other personal information listed in these profiles that should not be (spouse, home address etc.), but strangely it seems to be the Twitter accounts that are setting everyone off. I guess these bright young men and women somehow fail to understand what Twitter is.
Twitter is the electronic version of Hyde Park, where anyone can stand on a soap box and speechify with a megaphone. Each of these fine young staffers is one of those idiots, and I am another. There are many, many more idiots out there as well. We can, if we so choose, have a conversation, by screaming into our megaphones in turn. What we cannot do, is have a private conversation by pretending everyone else in the park is deaf. Twitter does not work that way. Anything said on Twitter is permanent, on the record, and if you know how to look, writ across the sky in flaming letters for all the world to see.
“But, but, but, YOU write under an alias!” someone is sure to whine. So I do. That’s not going to prevent anyone who wants to find me from doing so. I am just petty enough to make them work for it. After all, if you want to be good at something like being petty, you have to practice.
This is not even a new concept. For decades now we have been treated to long parades of people who somehow did not realize that everything done online is on the record forever. I really like bold Italicized underlines so let me say this again:
Everything done on line is on the record forever!
It’s more real than we are in some ways. Get used to it.
If u luvd this or H8ed this, ethar whey pls tell @CasualMeyhem & not us LOL xoxo
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