I recently started using Twitter much more. I’d had a profile for a while after many of my friends and colleagues had started using it but I never really got it. I’m still not sure that I do get it, but I’m beginning to understand the appeal.

After I started using it, my account grew pretty rapidly. I got to the stage where I was following 1400 people, and about 850 were following me. I was apparently moving up the Twitter ranks and was in the top 50 Sydney Twitterers – though the metric of that measurement is a little dubious, I think – but the combination of a few events made me pull the plug and delete my account.

I had never intended my account to be a public ranting space. I was interested in taking part in discussions and conversations on Twitter, but I found it incredibly easy to simply post amusing vignettes of my life, complaints about whatever was annoying me at the time and various calls for coffee, revolution and painful death upon my enemies. When someone pointed out that perhaps my complaints about a minor pay error could be read as perhaps a little unprofessional I realised I’d been treating what had grown to be a not insubstantial broadcast mechanism – with a readership rivaling a small community radio show and certainly several orders of magnitude higher than my blog – as my personal ranting ground. Complaints that I might have made in the privacy of my own house / friendship circle / IM chat were being read by people who may not have understood my personality, my tendency to blow up over minor things and do so in a fairly melodramatic fashion, the context the comments were made in and other mitigating factors.

My experience with Twitter happened around the same time there was a massive influx of new Twitterers, all of whom seemed to be social media consultants, gurus, seo consultants, experts and various snake oil salespeople. While I do personally work in social media and my phd studies are in social media, I am hesitant to ever claim any form of authority in that area. Partially because, well, no-one really knows what works and what doesn’t, and partially because it’s a new field with few established metrics. Also, Twittering about Twitter gets really, really boring. (I’m aware I blog about blogging, and I’m now blogging about Twittering, and right now I’m blogging about blogging about Twittering prior to posting this to my Twitter stream. SHUT UP.)

As someone who left journalism studies for media studies – and has a fairly fractious relationship with large bodies of cultural studies and media studies work at that – I find any approach that relies on normative statements, anecdote-as-evidence and poorly undertaken case studies excruciating. I got incredibly tired of Twitterers complaining about the use of closed profiles as though it was an affront to them – as though there was some correct way to use Twitter. To be fair, a number of these people have a lot of their social capital tied up in being perceived as experts. One of them spends a lot of time attacking more successful analysts and organisations for not conforming to her preconceived notion of what a successful blog is – which is completely backwards. She argued that GetUp failed because you weren’t able to create your own petition on their website – completely missing the fact that their focussed, on-message approach was what made them successful and not another Petition Online graveyard. I find it pretty indicative of someone’s intellectual rigor when they respond with to requests for evidence with snark and obfuscation, so I let the conversation die.

I also am wary of letting my public persona get too out of control. My sense of humour is a little warped, and I’m nowhere near as prone to stabbing people as you might think.

I was a little reluctant to delete my comments – I’d reached 5500, after all, and some of them were gems – but I remembered something one of my favorite comics (Louis CK) said about one of my other favorite comics (George Carlin):

Prolific, hard working… This is the way I would say George has had the most direct influence on me personally as a comedian. The guy did about seventeen full hour standup specials. Very generously, he explained how he pulled this off in a terrific interview that is available on a cd called Carlin on Carlin. He talks about spending every year on the road, working specifically on the next special. Every show has a goal, to hone the specific set he is expecting to shoot at the end of the year. Like writing a book. When he shoots the special, it’s over. That material goes away and he starts again. I listened to that interview one night, in my car, while coming from a show where I had just done my regular, stump speech hour that took me fifteen years to perfect, at a Chinese restaurant in Saugus Massachusettes. The show had gone well. And I didn’t care that it went well. It was solid material. It had been working for years. I’d been doing comedy for almost twenty. So what? Then I heard George explaining his process and I was terrified and inspired. What balls, to just chuck out perfectly good material and start again.

So I think it’s fine to start over. From now on I’ll be using @barrysaunders as my place for public chat rants, arguments and threats of random stabbings.