A solitary flag on the beach.

Warning: rambly, dumb-ass post ahead!

Last week I had the pleasure of a couple of evenings out in London for a few drinks and some chit-chat with some fellow Twitterers.  On Wednesday I met, for the first time I might add, @misshelved (whose name I didn’t actually find out until half-an-hour after meeting - I am not good at asking for that kind of information!). On Thursday I met up with the lovely @bear_faced_lady and quaffed many a lager and munched down a tasty burger.  Good times, good times…

But something has been occupying my mind in recent days in relation to the coming together of Twitter and “the real world”.  When I first started out on Twitter I wasn’t too bothered about what I said and how I said it.  I figured that if I said something that upset people it was no biggy, they just wouldn’t follow me (or they would unfollow me).  I didn’t know anyone so it wasn’t really a big issue.

Skip forward to a few years later and suddenly I seem to have met quite a few people I follow on Twitter.  According to my obligatory “Twitter folk I have met in real life” list, I have now met approximately 58 people on The Twitters. And the thing is, I like all 58 of them.  They’re all good folk and I have enjoyed a good beer or two with a fair few. But, right, here’s where I have the problem…

Recently, I find myself becoming far more conscious about the things I tweet.  Whereas before I could just literally be myself and tweet whatever I fancied about pretty much anything, now I often have to apply a filter before I tweet.  Often I stop to consider, “will this offend X?” or “will such and such make Y hate me?”.  Suddenly it has all be come so…personalised.  This is good, but also bad.  I feel that by engaging in self-censorship I have lost a little bit of what made Twitter so great and exciting when I first started out.  There have been times where I have literally written a tweet then deleted it because I was worried that someone might be upset with what I was about to say.  This is not a good thing.

Of course, I still say things that are contentious from time to time, but even those things seem to sit within the confines of what I think, on some level, others will think is acceptable.  This is not something that sits comfortably with me.  However, I don’t really see how I can do anything about this other than just accept that this is the direction in which my use of Twitter is evolving.  I’m certainly not keen on starting a new account from fresh, hidden from everyone else to regain the ability to say what I like.

That said, I know that even when I do apply my internal Twitter filter, I still manage to upset someone, somewhere.  So I guess, maybe, I should either drop the filter or embrace the filter.  Or, best of all, stop worrying about the filter altogether.  And once I have done that, I can stop writing stupid posts like this that don’t really go anywhere.  Apologies to you dear reader for wasting your time…

(Source: Flickr / villes)

The view from Whitstable beach where we had a lovely picnic :)

Portrait of a daddy.

Christian Haribos.

“There’s only one growth strategy: work hard.” (William Hague)

the digital divide refers to people that have access to digital media versus those that do not. are people who do not have a smartphone at a disadvantage (that is, are they on the wrong side of the digital divide)?