Breaking My Silence on Twitter

Cardinal Richelieu is purported to have said it best:

Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.

Rather: Given six lines written by the most honest man, I will find within them the means to have him hanged. At this point, I probably have enough on me to be hanged, shot, impaled, garrotted, burned at the stake, disemboweled, flayed and drawn and quartered:

A Code of Conduct

Earlier this year I decided to move the bulk of my casual Internet chatter to Twitter, precisely because it is recorded for posterity. My goal was to improve my online behaviour as well as save choice nuggets that otherwise went off into limbo. It seems to have worked, on the aggregate. Before I began, however, I felt it important to establish some principles.

Stow all complaints.: There is evidence that our attention behaves like a roving spotlight. Multitasking is a myth. If I complain about something, that is time spent not doing something else. Moreover, to complain publicly is to side-handedly solicit sympathy, and I don't want to be that person. As a bonus, the object of my complaint gets free publicity. That aside, do I really want my Web content legacy to consist of a bunch of whining?
Keep the language clean.: I have 140 characters to work with. Expletives are almost always noise. See the point about whining.
Normal people are reading this.: Since I work extensively with extremely precise language, I have a chronic habit of using it in everyday conversation. I grudgingly acknowledge Twitter as a huge aid in my ongoing journey to make my language more accessible.
If it seems vacuous, it probably is.: I do not need to pollute my stream and everybody else's with updates about meals, errands or bathroom breaks.
This isn't an instant messaging program.: Exchanging too many messages with someone is like yelling across a crowded room. The chart above indicates I am bad at this, but the astute will infer when I first made the chart.
Delete nothing.: If I said it on the Web, it exists out there somewhere. The Internet is a massive information-copying machine. To pretend that data works the same way physical objects do is futile. I admit I have contravened this principle a few times, but only to fix a particularly embarrassing typo.

Other People

Twitter has irrefutably enabled me to interact with people on an informal basis whom I would otherwise consider inaccessible — I just wouldn't think to contact them. The asymmetric model of interaction between people, otherwise known as following, is so head-smackingly basic and congruent with how real life works as well as the architecture of the Web that I strain to understand how the designers of so-called social media properties ever considered doing it any other way.

The people I follow are those whom I find interesting. When they cease to be interesting, I cease to follow them. While I grant other people some artistic license, I largely hold them to the same standard of content quality as myself.

Incidentally, following seems like it was once more politicized than it is today. Since I began using the service, I have noticed a marked drop in the expectation of people who follow me that I do the same in return — whether manual or automated.

I think the most significant element is that yes, Dorian, you are interacting with other people. It is a step in the opposite direction of the otherwise Aspergian, anonymous Internet.

Attention Sink

The continual chatter of, in my case, hundreds of people is an endless source of distraction, which is terrible for business. My chosen profession demands of me deep focus for hours at a time. It is because of this that I still use the site, and haven't selected a program that would undoubtedly bludgeon me with constant update notifications. When trying to concentrate, close the window and breathe.

Perhaps it is its simplicity and openness that elicits so much fanfare. People can't shut up about it. Including myself, apparently.