Why I won't Twitter for a while

I have been a Twitter user for quite some time now. Not that I use it regularly, but occasionally I feel the want to tell the world something either interesting, obtuse or provoking about myself.

But the time has come to say good bye to Twitter, for now. The reason is that I have become "twitterfied" - I am forced to think too much about what I am going to post.

The main thing that I love about Twitter is that it can be aligned with your own stream of consciousness: as you think of things, no matter how random, you can tell the world. Every so often you may produce a nugget of wisdom as an added bonus, but usually the net effect of Twitter is to see the world from a network rather than an individual perspective.

For those of you who are not familiar with Twitter, you can choose whose updates you wish to receive through being a "follower." If you choose to follow someone, you see what they write. I don't have many followers, around forty, but there are some who have thousands. Now as the author, you don't have to accept every follower - you can reject them and not allow them to see what your post. This is a very all or nothing approach however. And this is where I believe that there is a major downfall in Twitter.

Just because I believe someone should not have access to a post of mine, does not mean that I have an issue with them seeing all my posts. Yet when assessing whether I want someone to follow me, I am faced with an all or nothing choice. Twitter does not allow for levels of trust. For example, I may not wish for a former employee to see work related twitters, yet I may be quite happy for them to be aware of some random musings. Twitter does not allow me to differentiate from a semiotic point of view: what may be interesting to one person may not be interesting to another - an apple is not always an apple.

The end result is that I am being to "readerly" (apologies to the post modernists for the appropriation). I am considering the audience and changing the post with an awareness of who may read it. Thus the end post becomes fairly banal and contrived. The stream of thought disappears, replaced by the shadow of group judgement.

So how to solve this problem? The answer for Twitter is quite simple.

Imagine if Twitter was like an onion, with the Twitter author at the core. Based on a set of permissions that the author sets, different groupings of my followers have different trust levels. Around my core would be those I trust with all information, then with each layer or grouping of followers comes progressively lower levels of trust. Then I simply assign each post to a level of trust, and my problem is solved.

This solution keeps the integrity of Twitter in place and allows for largely uncensored dialogue, hopefully resulting in a better experience for authors and followers alike.

Until then, unless Twitter is using something like to monitor posts such as this, I say goodbye for now, and go back to a world where no one can hear me scream, but at least I can shout at the top of my lungs without concern.