I’ve had way too much time on my hands this holiday. Three weeks in Texas at your parents’ place will do that to you! Anyway, I spent a lot of this extra time online, which is no big surprise if you know me even a teensy bit. (For the record, I also did a lot of other offline things, like go to live music shows, organize my mother’s recipe cards, play Wii, and sit in the hottub. I’m just sayin’…) And the more time I spent on Twitter this holiday, the more I felt like things were too noisy, too unfocused, and rather ADHD-ish. It was bothering me. I gradually, here and there, began unfollowing people who were tweeting weird things like 8 Follow Fridays in a row, play-by-plays of the latest college basketball game, and judgmentalish-sounding tweets about veganism and charter schools. I became irritated by the flow of re-tweets of very simple, basic educational / pedagogical concepts, originally tweeted by some Big Name Important People in Ed Tech who just happen to have 3 jillion followers because they present regularly at the latest ISTE / EDUCAUSE / IFTA / InsertAcronymHERE Conference. It’s not the idea of a re-tweet or the pedagogical concept itself is what’s bothering me, but that 3 jillion followers get so crazy about something so simple — something that I feel really should be a given, not really re-tweetworthy. Basically, I was getting Twitteritis: my Twitterstream was inflamed, throbbing, and needed attention.
After a couple of days, I realized what I really needed to do was a complete overhaul of my Twitterstream. I was gonna need to unfollow the masses.
The Snips of Seymour Smith by bcostin Push by margolove