Friday, February 12, 2010

A self-conscious Tweeter…

I am a recent convert to the arts of blogging and ‘tweeting’. I have been on Facebook for the last few years and enjoy logging on, posting comments on friends’ photos and walls and attempting to come up with small witty statements to use as a ‘status’. I am by no means a regular user – mostly due to it being blocked at work :P - but when I find time at home, I do enjoy spending a few minutes skipping through the lives of my friends.


Tweeting and blogging, however, present new and different challenges. Suddenly I am putting my thoughts and ideas out into the general world of cyberspace, open and available for anyone and everyone who is interested/isn’t (but is bored) to read. Facebook is a safer world: a more comfortable space, as it is mostly my poor friends who are forced to read my nonsense; friends who have learnt the art of simply ignoring me and my rambling over the years. I voiced my slight insecurity to my boyfriend the other day who seemed surprised by my point of view. He is a regular ‘tweeter’ who enjoys Twitter as a way of passing on very interesting social commentary and general useful content – but what if what I have to say is not interesting? What if people are bored by my random useless ‘tweets’ or posts. Or, are they not useless and rather highly insightful and interesting and I am just too self-conscious to realise this? The new world of online communication, blogging and tweeting (a word I just can’t seem to stop smiling at) requires a far more open ‘self’, a ‘self’ prepared to share, a self that believes that what crosses one’s mind on a day–to-day basis is worth sharing with others.

I have always wanted to blog and I seem to be enjoying sharing, at least I enjoy writing down the thoughts in my head, and though learning to paraphrase these thoughts into less than 140 characters still remains a challenge, I will persevere… On that last point, who set the number of characters? Was a study done on the capacity of a human to voice a thought in that amount of space? Or is it a completely random number?

How are you all feeling about spreading your thoughts?