3 ms·

In disagreeing with the rule I stated, you're advocating reading tweets which are either (a) uninteresting, or (b) contain only information already widely share

In disagreeing with the rule I stated, you're advocating reading tweets which are either (a) uninteresting, or (b) contain only information already widely shared. Are you really advocating that? (And if so, which part?) I agree with you about the echo chamber. But it's virtually impossible to live inside an echo chamber when you follow people who share mostly information that is not widely held. By definition, that means those people aren't merely echoing the crowd, and this will take you away from people with me-too tweets about iPhone antenna issues (or whatever the news of the hour is).

igravious 16y ago
Hi Michael, I could be advocating not following anybody at all, I could be advocating the avoidance of micro-blogging services in the first place :) At least though if you are going to follow somebody then you are indeed right, you should follow somebody like Stephen Fry for instance who is nice erudite chap or the people you mention also sound cool. Or if Wittgenstein was still around, I'd totally follow him (not that he'd be seen dead "tweeting" I'd imagine). The same goes for me though. I get my political info from a handful of blogs that all share the same bias. I have to remind myself to check out the opposition from time to time to get some well-needed perspective. I guess you could say the same for cable news except that somebody is preselecting the bias for you. Maybe I'm weird but I have never felt the urge to "follow" someone on Identi.ca or Twitter or whatever's the flavo(u)r of the day ... :)
- michael_nielsen 16y ago
  Thanks for the clarification --- I had misread your previous comment as advocating a different information-gathering strategy, not as avoiding the particular information source (Twitter) entirely. Of course, I have no problem with that, even though I personally find Twitter quite useful in this regard.

igravious 16y ago

Hi Michael, I could be advocating not following anybody at all, I could be advocating the avoidance of micro-blogging services in the first place :) At least though if you are going to follow somebody then you are indeed right, you should follow somebody like Stephen Fry for instance who is nice erudite chap or the people you mention also sound cool. Or if Wittgenstein was still around, I'd totally follow him (not that he'd be seen dead "tweeting" I'd imagine). The same goes for me though. I get my political info from a handful of blogs that all share the same bias. I have to remind myself to check out the opposition from time to time to get some well-needed perspective. I guess you could say the same for cable news except that somebody is preselecting the bias for you. Maybe I'm weird but I have never felt the urge to "follow" someone on Identi.ca or Twitter or whatever's the flavo(u)r of the day ... :)

michael_nielsen 16y ago
Thanks for the clarification --- I had misread your previous comment as advocating a different information-gathering strategy, not as avoiding the particular information source (Twitter) entirely. Of course, I have no problem with that, even though I personally find Twitter quite useful in this regard.