Months ago I posted about My Love Affair and Subsequent Breakup with Twitter, and Why We Might Give It Another Go. This post documented my hot and cold relationship with Twitter, but ended with my hope that we would reconcile. Twitter and I had a few conversations about boundaries first, spent some time reacquainting ourselves with one another and then enthusiastically launched back into a relationship.
I believe that I gave it my best shot. But despite some good times, we are taking a break and Twitter is sleeping on the couch.
So allow me to dish a bit about our relationship troubles…
When Twitter and I got back together, we spent a good amount of time together, but not too much time (unlike last time when a lack of boundaries caused our relationship to go sour the first time). One of the boundaries that I set with Twitter is that there would be clear parameters for our time together. We would spend time together when I was at work because that was the aspect of Twitter that most attracted me to him (learning about latest trends in education and educational technology). I set up a number of special searches and hashtags that I followed, rather than just people, so that I could really hone in on the information of interest to me rather than relying on the shotgun approach where information was just shot at you and you had to get what you can.
We had some really intense and special moments; I met some new friends, followed a few conferences from a distance, and read some great articles and blogs that Twitter turned me onto. Those times were thrilling and certainly reinforced my decision to get back together with Twitter.
But over time I started to realize how much Twitter drew my attention away from the work I could be doing to help improve teaching and learning in my back yard. Twitter was directing my focus too much to the world around me, and I was back to the head twitching craziness of trying to catch as many tweets as I could as they flashed across my screen. The more I have researched about the dangers of multi-tasking with technology, the more I realized that Twitter was drastically affecting my productivity at work. I was having a significantly harder time being the analytic and creative educator that I pride myself to be.
That was just one of the problems. Twitter also made me feel bad. Most of the people I follow had thousands of followers, and that made me feel angst because I have very few in comparison. The angst was caused by the draw of two competing psychological needs, esteem and self-actualization. On the one hand, having lots of followers would make me feel worthy and interesting, so perhaps I should pursue that goal. But on the other hand, I wanted to be authentic and only share things on Twitter when I thought they were important. I didn’t feel like I had enough to share on a daily or even weekly basis that could possibly draw additional followers. So my desire to be validated and liked ended up losing out to my desire to be authentic and use my time wisely. I realized that I would much rather be esteemed by my colleagues at work by doing my job well than invest a significant portion of my day to trying to get a follow. Twitter just couldn’t fulfill my needs.
So Twitter is sleeping on the couch right now. I can’t outright kick him out and say it’s over. We really have had some amazing times together. I think we have just needed our space so that we can find a way to be together in a way that works for both of us. Now that we’ve had our time apart, we’re just about to go into relationship counseling. I’ll let you know how it goes.
