For the longest time I thought Twitter was useless and had pretty much decided never to use it, but then I used it recently when my Airtel account was giving issues to reach out to their head office and had a good response. At that time I seriously considered starting to post stuff on Twitter but then changed my mind about it. By now you must be wondering (if you actually read the post till here) why am I talking about Twitter like its a new technology, its not. It was just something I was thinking about so decided to write it (plus I was getting tired of lying in bed sick). Basically I realized that if I started posting on Twitter then a lot of the stuff I write about can be taken in the wrong context and potentially get me in trouble.
When you are posting a blog posting or an article, it’s well over 255 characters long and it takes you time and effort to type it out, think through the point you are making etc (for example I will probably re-write this post a couple of times before I click publish). Twitter is meant to be quick, a note to self or random thought that you share with the world. This is both the beauty and danger of Twitter, it makes it so easy to post something in the spur of the moment that you might regret later when you think about it. A sarcastic comment in a three para blog post has a lot of context around it and is hard to misquote, but on twitter that’s all you see and since there is no context it can be taken any way and given whatever context people want.
For example, if I have a bad day in the train and post a blog post about it and then as part of the post/explanation say something about blowing it up to make something better then people wouldn’t have an issue. However if I made a post on Twitter saying something like “Train Commutes suck, all trains should be blown up to make room for something better” then it sends a completely different message and can potentially get folks arrested. In past comments made on Twitter have gotten people deported, arrested etc. Plus with my sense of humor, I need as much room as possible to explain the context without getting into trouble.
We this is all for now. Will post more later. (and yes hopefully the updates will be more frequent)
– Suramya