I know that some of you have been very good at resisting the siren song of The Twitters. I have pretty much turned right into the rocks.
Not that I’m tweeting 24/7 or anything. My tweets are primarily:
(1) Links to my new blog posts, when I manage to get it together to write new blog posts.
(2) Retweets of good stuff others have tweeted, especially links to pieces that I want to reread more carefully later.
(3) Passing thoughts about my job, my kids, my commute, or whatever.
(4) Occasionally, live-notes from a conference session I’m attending.
(5) Playing along with hashtag games (e.g., the recent #ReplaceLoveWithSoup).
My tweets, generally speaking, involve much less time and thought than my blog posts, and they are frequently more silly and/or smart alecky.
But here’s the thing:
I’ve been picking up Twitter followers, as one does. Some of them are actually pretty famous and well-respected people in fields upon which my work (not just my blogging-work, but my actual professorial research/teaching/service-work) touch. Some of them are pretty famous and well-respected people in my home discipline. Also, not that it necessarily matters (but I can’t rule out the possibility that it might), some of these famous-folks are a generation or two older than me.
… and now there’s something like the possibility of meeting some of these famous-folk in real life (say, at a professional meeting) and having their primary information about me at that moment come from my tweets. And it’s hard to anticipate how famous scientists and philosophers feel about replacing love with soup.
Or to know whether it should matter to me.
Are any of you in a similar situation? Does it influence how you tweet? Have you decided that your Twitter followers deserve what they get from your tweet-stream?
An interesting question. I tend to think that on Twitter, your audience largely finds you. After all, they have to take the active decision to follow you – presumably after viewing your profile and seeing what they’re signing up for. Changes in the content and style of my tweets over time have probably been more due to active feedback (retweets and replies) than who has decided to follow me, which I’ve stopped paying much attention to, to be honest.
This has been my sense as well.
But then there are Twitter’s “Who to follow” suggestions. Depending on that algorithm, I could imagine people might follow (at least for awhile) tweeters of the sort they would not necessarily find otherwise, and that this might create … interesting leakages of information and personalities across worlds that normally do not collide.
I reckon the effects of accepting “Who to follow” suggestions and then being *horrified* by what the people you’re following have tweeted might be greater on folks who are new to Twitter and its culture(s). And, there’s significant overlap, it seems, between “New to Twitter” and “Noted Elder Statesperson in Field Dr. Free-Ride Belongs to or Interacts with”.
“Some of them are pretty famous and well-respected people in my home discipline.”
This has happened to me on my IRL Twitter account 3 times. It is kind of flattering and kind of stifling. I am applying for jobs at all 3 of the places where they work. So, yes, it has changed what I say on Twitter.
This has happened to me more with the blog than with Twitter, but it was pretty surprising when it started. For example, a professor on my hall (who I know but don’t work with) stopped me and said “Somebody at an ocean science conference told me that you’re famous on the internet!” Meep!
I do deliberately tailor my online persona to deal with this potential audience. My personal policy is to never blog/tweet anything that would jeopardize my relationship with my advisor. (He would find some things that I write about to be strange and offputting, but never scientifically incorrect or unethical.) For this reason I also mostly stay away from religion and politics (with the exception of topics that relate directly to ocean stuff.)
Holly & I just had a #scio13 session accepted that deals with this exact topic. Working title: “What Happens When People Start Taking Your Online Ramblings Seriously: Oh Shit.”
I think I am only aware of 2 IRL profession-style Tweet followers. One knows, the other would have to be brain dead not to know who I am… And nothing would surprise either.
The older generation? Ahh, life’s too short to worry about that.