“Can I tweet about her blog?” (pt. 2)
I’d like to talk about Twitter and privacy. I have a good friend in the archival world who has refused to join facebook or most other social networking tools because of the amount of personal information they require to sign up. Most of these companies are not run in Canada, and can’t be counted on to be held to fine Canadian standards regarding the protection of personal information in electronic formats. But she joined Twitter, because all it requires is an email address. Simple, clean, and pretty not sketchy.
The other privacy concern I have with Twitter is more existential. I recently started a second account for my LIBR 559M course through UBC. See, I’ve been tweeting for months now, in a protected account, and I just wanted to keep those worlds separate. Not because I dish about my scandalous secret life, just because…my normal tweets are boring, except to my close friends. I like being able to crow about the sweet bargain I got at Value Village, but I feel a little weird informing all my classmates, professors, and whoever else about that.
In our class discussion board, we’ve been discussing this article by Erika Pearson about performance and identity in social networks. Sometimes the technology doesn’t permit the nuanced performances we need. Twitter’s simplicity means that you can’t really tailor your message or differentiate your audience. With email, I could, say send a forward only to select people in my address book. Twitter doesn’t permit that, except through direct messages, which are practically emails anyway. While I sometimes enjoy having public conversations on Twitter, that is done in consideration of a relatively limited audience. For me, this single volume means having a business account with Twitter and a personal account, and keeping my two streams of tweets separate.
(Don’t worry, I’m not so naive to think that my tweets or my emails are protected and secret. Obviously, emails can be forwarded and tweets retweeted. I mean more for general day-to-day clarity.)
I understand about having to manage two different accounts, one for class and a personal one. What I found to be very useful, as I have to manage my one for class, my personal one and a work one is TweetDeck. You probably already heard of it, but it allows your to manage anything you want on Twitter (http://tweetdeck.com/beta/features/manage-multiple-twitter-accounts-easily/) and can be used on any system. Just a thought 🙂
Bryan
26 Sep 09 at 6:14 am
Good point. Unfortunately, I have a ye olde iBook G4 that has some serious technological restraints. Once I upgrade, for sure!
KM
26 Sep 09 at 6:54 am
Do you think its something innate in humans, to want to organize and classify things – how we fit life in boxes, one for family, friends, another for our profession?
I guess I’m trying to do the opposite: instead of managing multiple sides, multiple online social accounts, I decided to leave it in one big mashup.
Because sometimes we learn things from the people we least expect to learn it from?
I wouldn’t mind getting your value village tweet, because i’ve never heard of value village, and now i have some new knowledge I wouldn’t have got if you didn’t tweet it : )
Alicia Yeo
26 Sep 09 at 11:47 am
In the broadest sense, we need to organize information just so our brains don’t get overwhelmed. With Twitter, I find that the lack of differentiation means that I can’t craft my online relationships as individually as I would like.
(If you’re in Vancouver, I recommend the VV on Victoria — I’ve made some great finds there!)
KM
26 Sep 09 at 1:13 pm