Image by McBeth, used under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license on Flickr.
It’s pretty obvious that Twitter is a great tool for connectivity. You can connect to people you already know, people you wish you knew, famous people, academics… there’s nothing stopping you starting a conversation with anyone else on Twitter. This is what I love about it. But I’ve noticed that the boundaries (or lack of) between people on Twitter and how we interact with people offline is freaking different (obviously)… but lately I’ve been reading so much and connecting so much on Twitter, that it’s spilled over to my offline world, and although it’s not confusing for me, it is for others.
Some of the most interesting things I see or learn about during the day happen on Twitter. So naturally I want to share these with people close to me in the offline world. But it’s so weird to talk about it with them. Imagine being on the receiving end of this tirade by me: “Oh it was so funny today, (random tweep you don’t know #1) said to (random tweep you don’t know #2) all this stuff about the internet filter, then (random tweep you don’t know #3) re-tweeted what (random tweep you don’t know #1) said and… (blah, blah, blah, goes on like this for five minutes)…” If you had to listen to that you’d confused, perplexed and possibly thinking that I’m inventing friends in my mind.
I’m talking about these people I follow on Twitter like I know them, when I actually have no idea what their real name even is. It doesn’t seem confusing for me, but I guess it is when you’re not in a Twitter mindset.
It’s hard to drag Twitter conversations from Twitter with all their quirks (jargon, character limits and abbreviations) to a spoken conversation in the physical world. But that’s probably not going to stop me trying.
