My analogy for understanding social media and Twitter in particular is this: Twitter is speaking into a megaphone in a very large, very crowded room. Twitter now has over 100 million users (and Facebook has even more)! If your user profile is open, all of those people have access to anything you post as a tweet or an @reply. Even if your profile is locked, all of your friends have access to everything you tweet. So, to carry through with the analogy, even if you have your profile locked, you are just in a locked room in the very crowded building, and any of your friends are free to leave the room and pass along to others what you have tweeted.
So, that analogy has several implications for our ethic of social media. It informs what we should or shouldn't post, how we should relate to others, and the attitudes we should display on Twitter. So, here are a few ethical principles I have developed based on this analogy of Twitter. I'll give you the "don't's" today, then the "do's" on another day.
#1 - Don't tweet anything you wouldn't want your mother (or father, brother, sister, spouse, fiance, children, best friend, etc.) to hear. Once you tweet something, you have absolutely no control over what happens to it after that in this incredibly crowded room. There's a good chance that your mother is in the room. Even if not, there are plenty of people in the room who may know your mother and pass along to her something you posted on Twitter. We must remember that Twitter is not an isolated conversation. There are millions of people who can pick up on our tweets and pass them along. Your tweet may not make it to your mother, but it could be picked up by someone else you care about and negatively impact their view of you. So, think about the things you say on Twitter. Are you okay with everyone in your life seeing the language you use? the subjects you tweet about? the way you respond to others?
#2 - Don't expect others to respond to everything you tweet. Twitter is a great way of increasing our sense of narcissism. Because there are tens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of people following us, we think that everyone cares about everything we tweet and have some obligation to respond to our tweets. We get an inflated sense of ourselves and how others should view us. But, we have to remember, that a tweet comes with no strings attached. You should tweet simply because you want to express yourself, but no one in this crowded room has an obligation to respond to what you tweet.
Remember, it is a very crowded room, and there are hundreds, if not thousands of conversations going on every day even in the limited circle of people you follow. I follow about three hundred people on Twitter (a fairly small number for a lot of pastors, but I am kind of selective), and I have about 350 followers. I don't have the time or capacity to keep up with everything everyone says on Twitter in a given day. So, I have an application that allows me to filter and categorize my tweeps so that I don't get just a lot of noise. There are certain people that I "pay more attention to." There are people that I often respond to, and people that I never respond to. Beyond that, I may walk out of the room for several hours. When I come back into the room, I may not catch up on all the conversations that have taken place in the time since I left the room. So, I may not respond to something you posted. It doesn't mean I don't care. It just means that I wasn't in the room when you used the megaphone. If you really care about making sure someone gets the word, send them a DM or actually text them. But don't get upset at people for not responding to your generic tweet.
#3 - Don't be passive aggressive on Twitter. What I mean by that is, don't use Twitter as a means to attack someone, complain about someone, be ugly about someone. Even if you don't mention the person by name, there's a really good chance that some/many/or all of your followers have a really good idea who you are talking about. In this crowded room, there are others who are aware of the situation, and you may be doing damage to your relationship with them, to their understanding of your character, and to your reputation. Additionally, a lot of people use Twitter to "secretly" attack someone who is actually following them on Twitter. That's just not cool. If you have a problem with someone, don't get on the megaphone to complain about them. Talk to them, but don't air it out for all of us to hear, because, quite frankly, we don't want to hear it.
#4 - Don't have arguments on Twitter. This one is closely connected to the former one and is often a result of it. Nobody in a big crowded room wants to hear you fighting back and forth with someone else on a megaphone. If you've got an issue that you are going to fight about, move the conversation to DMs, text messages, or actual real world conversations. Don't air it on the Twittersphere for all to hear. Even if someone else fires a shot at you, be the bigger person and move the conversation to an avenue where you can actually resolve the issue. Again, we don't want to hear it, and it doesn't build other people up. Each of these last two actually do considerable damage to the relationship with the other person and to other people's opinion of you. When you move an argument, disagreement, relationship issue to Twitter, you have opened it up for all the world to see. You have magnified the intensity of the issue by the factor of however many people are listening because you have exposed the issue to hundreds or thousands of people. Here's the general rule of thumb for life: Praise publicly, criticize privately. People always respond better to that simple standard. Besides, Twitter is one of the worst avenues in the world for having an argument. How in the world can you really get to the heart of an issue when you have 140 characters or less? By having an argument on Twitter, you are demonstrating that you don't really care about finding any resolution to this issue. You just want to fire shots at the other person. And that is not a Christlike way to handle problems.
#5 - Don't have lengthy Twitter conversations. My rule of thumb is, if you are having a conversation that just involves you and another person, after about three @replies, it's time to move the conversation to DMs or text messages. Remember, it is a crowded room, and your conversations should be beneficial or engaging to the other people in the room. If you are just having an A-B conversation, and nobody else is engaged in it, move the conversation. If the conversation engages more than one other person, it's probably okay to take it to about 5 @replies. And if there are a large number of people engaging, it's okay to keep it going. If your conversation is of a personal nature (I can't believe so and so did such and such!) or the mundane (Can you pick up a gallon of milk on the way home?), keep it off Twitter.
#6 - Don't be a whiner. It's okay to very occasionally post about something that frustrates you, an issue that you want to champion, things that bug you or get on your nerves. Twitter is a great avenue to do that and see if other people experience the same things and maybe even get some answers for how to deal with it. But, don't be a constant complainer. The other people in the room will get tired of it quickly.
#7 - Don't overtweet. Okay, this one is just a little bit of a pet peeve of mind, but maybe the rest of you are okay with it. In this big, crowded room, if you are constantly on the megaphone, it get's old. Tweet stuff that has some interest, impact, or bearing on your followers. It's okay to tweet where you are eating occasionally or when you are going to the store or that you are going to bed. Just don't do it all the time. If all you are tweeting to me is a running agenda, your schedule for the day, or your current location, I don't care. I guess this is kind of an arbitrary number, but if you are sending out more than 5-7 tweets an hour (not including @replies) you may be guilty of overtweeting.
Okay, well, I guess there are probably some other principles you could come up with based on this analogy, and if you do, please feel free to share them. But for now, that's what I've got. I'll share my "do's" for Twitter in the next post.
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