Ranpitsu

Twitter is great, but our insatiable appetite for immediacy may be clouding our sense of propriety sometimes. One has only to sit through a corporate meeting in which half the people in the room are replying to texts and e-mails on their cell phones to see just how little face-to-face interaction is respected in some settings. And even when the setting is appropriate, the content (as in Powell’s case) might be better saved for an e-mail to a group of friends, not a post to the world.

Discretion may be the better part of valor, but it’s also a necessary virtue for anyone who wants to practice “safe tweeting.”

The latest source of my dilemma is Twitter, which lets you spit out real-time reports about what you’re thinking and doing. It’s fun to track the digital ejaculations of selected Twitterati. But a couple thousand people signed up unsolicited to follow my tweets. And I feel guilty when not serving this hungry crowd—remorseful when I am.

Since I don’t know many in this mob, I try not to be personally revealing. Still, no matter how innocuous your individual tweets, the aggregate ends up being the foundation of a scary-deep self-portrait. It’s like a psychographic version of strip poker—I’m disrobing, 140 characters at a time.

To stay sane, any consumer needs to think of digital technology as a subscription rather than a product. In the old days, you could buy a typewriter, television or a camera, and it might well last decades. Computers have been different. Once you buy a PC, you are really signing up to upgrade it on a regular basis. Now digital consumer electronics are the same. Your camera, video disc player, and even your television are now likely to become obsolete in just a few years.