Here are my two cents worth on this subject:
First of all, even though I am on FACEBOOK, I don’t follow it, not even regularly. The reasons: Time is a factor…I rather spend the time on my blogs. Second: “You are known by the company you keep”…all one has to do is look at a person’s profile and who the FACEBOOK friends are and you can get a fairly accurate picture of that person.
I think that FACEBOOK can also be brutally honest, exposing people’s frailties and faults and that has produced some very unfortunate suicides and the like. It is bad enough that a person has insecurities but when other people mischievously or shamelessly make comments that will hurt somebody…not all people are either mature enough or intelligent enough to be able to differentiate what is real and what is a stab at slander.
With Twitter I am going to reserve judgment because I don’t follow it and I am only seeing the brevity, the simplistic involvement. I am a much more complicated and thorough person. To do TWITTER would mean to simplify some very complicated and deep subjects and I don’t think it is even possible to do so as one can with a blog for example. TWITTER is a platform that does not offer me any incentives. I suppose the simplistic nature of it is what attracts somebody like Sarah Palin, who can’t be intellectually curious or honest.
I also recognize that without it some events taking place in Egypt or the aborted revolution in Iran would not have been possible. That is the new reality of our world today: instant communications on a personal level; technology for the masses. I will not fight it but I am not going to participate in it enthusiastically.