On Twitter and Tweeting

So, the other night I read this article about Twitter.  And it got me thinking, not along the lines of the article exactly, but just how I personally use Twitter.   Much of my Twitter usage is a way for me to get information.  As Jackie will sometimes say, Twitter serves as my morning paper - I get information about various sports, and the most specifically about the teams I have the most interest in; I get news on politics, both local and national, random human interest and science stories, news about books, and other assorted stories that I find interesting.

This part of my Twitter usage seems perfectly rational and good to me - there's value in being informed; and there's value in learning information about topics that one finds interesting. 

It's the other part of Twitter usage question, to actually tweet, that was pricks my mind, so to speak, and drove me to post a late night, poorly worded thought, providing that I was pondering this question - do you keep doing something if no one would notice if you stopped.  At the time, as I was thinking about this question as it regarded tweeting, and if the answer to that question was a yes - do I get enough out of the act of doing so to make it a worthwhile experience.  It made sense to me when I posted it.

But, now, the next day, reading my wording....yeah, this was exceptionally poor wording on my part.  Too vague, inadvertently too dramatic, just very poor.  It's a good reminder that one of the limitations of most social media platforms is their brevity, which often forces us to share in ways we wouldn't otherwise - share without context, with less specificity and more ambiguity, because we don't take the time to articulate fully; in part, because social media doesn't encourage us to do so.  It encourages us to share snapshots, that are often so devoid of context.

In any event, I had some slight embarrassment this morning when I realized my poor wording choice.  And I have continued thoughts on whether it makes sense to engage on Twitter (and other social media), as opposed to just utilizing Twitter (and other social media) to obtain and digest (hopefully) relevant and interesting information.