I’ve given up on Twitter. I won’t be removing my account as Twitter still has some use to for browsing the stream but there really isn’t any compelling interactions on that service for me any longer. The only things that will end up on Twitter really are links to blog posts and maybe the one-off comment.
Ever since Twitter enabled the data download feature on my account, I took advantage of it. I downloaded the entire archive and discovered to my pleasure that Twitter stored all my tweets as plain text in a CSV file. I spent the last months migrating my old Tweets into my Day One application. I will hand one thing to Twitter, it did keep me “logging” along for a long time. I’m switching that impulse over to Day One. It’s impressive just how much of my past I have recorded. It turns out to be about 2600 days, or about 7 years of my past – recorded and in some ways with a lot of resolution. For that I will always be thankful for Twitter. However…
The reason why I am leaving Twitter is because it is too exposed. I didn’t feel it was useful to have a private Twitter account, so I left it public and this decision was made with a devil-may-care attitude, that anything I tweeted wouldn’t matter. As it turns out, it does. Mostly this is because of my workplace, in that I do not trust them or anyone who works there. It’s not really anything meant to be hurtful or anything, but I can’t risk my job and I certainly feel that sharing on Twitter threatens my employment. For as far as I trust Western Michigan University, it starts and ends with the partitioned, compartmentalized version of me that works there professionally. Not the true honest authentic me. Being honest and sharing freely would just upset everyone and lead to needless drama at work, so I unfollowed a bunch of coworkers and people whose tweets would have gone to waste on an ignored account.
Another problem with Twitter is the loss of engagement and dimensionality. Everyone on Twitter is a three-dimensional person with all the complexities that come with being alive. Twitter’s relationships seem stuck in a one-sided mode of conversation. This very thing struck me most powerfully as I was migrating Tweets into my Day One app. I caught out of the corner of my eye tweets that I had made to people who were popular or famous. They were wasted messages. At first this concerned me, but then I realized that what was really going on was that the people who had thousands and thousands of followers were so far beyond their social horizon (that 150 limit I’ve written about before) that they simply cannot socially relate to anyone beyond their subset coterie of social contacts. It’s not that they are mean or being ignorant, but they just cannot process that level of interaction – it’s more about how our biology is colliding with our technology. So for the really famous, the really popular, that’s where the dimensionality comes in. A regular person is three-dimensional. The others are one-dimensional. They are human billboards. They stand there and output information and you stop thinking of them as individuals and start relating to them as “sources” instead. Robbing them of their inherent humanity. They don’t have feelings, as billboards don’t have feelings.
So, we’re all done with that. Twitter will still be a link-dump for my blog. Most of my actual sharing will start in Byword, then be copied to Day One, then from there shared to Facebook under my “Sharing” security model. If you don’t see lots of things on my Facebook wall, that’s because you aren’t in “Sharing”, and mostly that’s because I can’t allow my honest self to interfere with my work. — Gosh, writing that out felt wrong, but at least I’m honest.
If you follow me on Twitter and want to keep your lists tidy and unfollow me, I won’t even notice you leaving. So go in peace.
Yeah…lately I've been thinking about how I use Twitter and the understanding that I have it linked to Facebook, which means I either have to temporarily unlink it if I don't want something to end up on FB, or else create a byzantine system that prevents certain people from reading what I write. I've also delved into the potentially dangerous territory of linking Fated to End Sometime with my G+ profile, the gains being more exposure in Google search results, thus more site traffic, the downsides being more exposure in Google search results, and the potential for someone to find out something about me that they don't like or agree with. Consequently I find myself sharing less and being cautious about the material that I do share. It's turned into a vicious cycle of WTF do I do now?
I got back into both Twitter & FB with the idea that I would need the exposure to help promote the book that I cannot find the time plus energy to properly edit, now that it's written. I'm also finding that there seem to be a significant number of people in the writing circles I've joined that aggravate me deeply. All in all it's a big bunch of weird that I haven't quite found the answer to, other than to periodically stop writing entirely, which is counter-productive in the long run. Since I'm metaphorically treading water creatively, my little blurbs of this or that on these networks is just … meh. At least when I write a blog post on FtES I feel like I've created a little something all my own, not just contributed to the BIG SOCIAL NETWORK's data collection scheme.
I've toyed with the idea of setting up a Diaspora* node, but I'm a bit too security conscious for that, not to mention my bandwidth is rather limited. I wish I had access to Google's Fiber internet service…things would be a bit different then.
Argh.