Twitter has been one of my favorite Internet places for at least the past 5 years. Twitter always distinguished itself from Facebook for me because of its 'just a quick thought'-ness. Anything you can think of, just dump it on Twitter. Friends might follow you on Twitter, but thoughts on there are generic and meant to be seen by the world. Anything personal that I want kept between my circle of friends goes on Facebook, anything that doesn't require a friend context goes on Twitter.
Or at least that's how I started using Twitter, but I no longer use it that way. I've been tweeting my random thoughts less and less - more on that later. My main use of Twitter for the past few years(!) has been to complain. There's nothing more satisfying when your train is running late again than to fire off an angry tweet towards the train company (that's you, TFL). Or if my mobile phone's internet has failed yet again during my daily commute (that's you, Three). Or if the software for my fitness tracker is just so shit I can't bear to use it (that's you , Garmin). But I digress. What used to be a frivolous form of quick mind-blogging has turned into an utterly useless hatefest. It's not healthy to use Twitter just for that.
So what about the other use? What about the short random thoughts? I had a fun random thought the other day at work, while performing a request for a client that was a bit out of my comfort zone, but at the same time no trouble at all and quickly handled. In a split-second I came up with "I'm a developer, not a nanny", fired off a tweet and forgot about it. My mood never darkened, I didn't brood on it, I just thought it was a funny thought because it drew parallels with the "I'm a doctor, not an X" meme from Star Trek which (I assumed) would resonate among my developer friends that are following me. Instead I got a concerned message from one of the people I work for asking me if everything was OK.
This is wrong on so many levels, but the main thing that bothers me is this: I know my colleagues quite well (I think), and I think they know me quite well. They know my personality and they know I'll speak up when something bothers me, yet somehow the off chance that an extremely generic statement I make on a personal Twitter account might somehow end up reflecting badly on my client, or my client's client, means that I will be spoken to by someone who did not understand the context in which the remark was made, or what it was even meant to represent.
And you know what the worst part is? I am in the wrong! I'm not saying that sarcastically, I truly believe that I did the wrong thing. I am wrong to assume that it's ok to share a short message publicly without context and expect people to understand all of its nuances. The past that I fondly remember is not 'better' because people back then knew you better and knew to take things in context or not place too highly a value on it; it's just that I used to get away with it because it just didn't occur to anyone to check on Twitter what people you know are saying in public. You can argue very strongly for the right to say anything you want on the internet and get away with it but from a purely game-theoretic perspective an employer would be stupid not to check. All things being equal you'd rather have an employee with zero public presence than an employee with a potentially negative web presence.
I don't fault people for thinking this way but, again from a game-theoretic perspective, my chances of remaining employed, and getting job interviews, only increases by shutting down my Twitter account. I'm not saying any public presence is a risk by definition. Github is a really good example of something that will very likely benefit you, even if you don't write a lot of code publicly. Even if you suck at coding, Github would be a representation of that. It's hard (but not impossible!) to take source code out of context, especially compared to a message of max 140 characters.
This is not 2005 any more. Back then as a fresh 20-something in Japan I could tweet and blog anything I liked without consequences. But in 2015 as a 30-something trying to be a responsible developer you simply can't blurt out random things in public.
Lack of context creates misunderstandings. I truly believe in openness of information and that, provided all parties have the full context available, more information can only have a positive effect. But no one on the internet has the time or the interest to research the full context of something before making up their opinion. That simple little fact makes Twitter a risk without a reward.
I've pondered on whether I should write about this at all, and I'm still pondering about closing this blog again in favor of having an anonymous blog, which is what I did a while back. I came back here, to the good old Colorful Wolf, because I believed that I could provide the context people need to understand me. I naively believe that I still can have a net positive effect on the world by writing and sharing the things that interest me.
