I suppose I should be writing this on my Twitter account, but I’m way too verbose. I’m also a slow writer and a dim thinker. I have always had the tendency towards equivocation, and this habit became very much worse by spending too much time trying to be as accurate as possible in my academic writing. It’s perverse, because I want to make things clear and truthful by pointing out all the uncertainties, but the way I write makes it only worse and less clear. But I digress.
Twitter is a useful tool, and a part of me thinks I should really have started earlier. The main reason is its convenience. I no longer have to update a number of different profiles spread across different services. Another part of me, however, still habours some doubts. I think it comes down to its ephemerality. Tweets are just like sending and receiving text messages. Read, deleted, and forgotten.
Blogs seem more permanent. This is a matter of perception. I remember doubts people had over websites, which were prone to changes and could disappear any time, unlike physical books and paper. I initially distrusted information on the web too. That changed when I started to make web pages. Then, as blogs started to appear so many years ago, I felt they were impermanent and fragile compared to websites. I stuck with coding HTML in hand, and publishing web pages for some time, until last year (2008). Then I moved my web site to this blog, and I am happier for it.
I’m always hesitant about adopting new technologies. Perhaps it’s my risk-averse nature, but often I end up being converted. I suppose this will take place with Twitter, as I start to utilize it more.
The big question, I suppose, is what next? Communication has become more brief and more instant over the past few years, but surely there is a limit to how much constant interaction we can take, and how much we can abbreviate what we want to say?