The Stupidest Guy In The Room of 140Characters

This my response to Jen Wagner's post on Friendship and 140 Characters

Fascinating conversation. My reaction? OK, once again, I venture into the realm where people write sonnets and I am going to sound all - blah, bub-blah, bub-blah, me-too, bub-blah, me-too.

How do I sort through all the thoughts posted, reconcile the conflicting themes in my heart and head, and tease from the conversation the nuggets of brilliance that resonate with me and mold them into coherent response? Here goes:

1) Sorting The Constant Flow. That is an idea that resonates. Since I started blogging socially 3 years ago and professionally 2 years ago, I think that is a large a part of what has been happening to me. My attention has turned outward to a bigger wider world of ideas that I would not be a part of unless I had taken those steps. It is a cascade of new ideas that I am finding difficult to keep up with, never mind choosing the pieces I need to weave into my professional practice. Recently (maybe in the WoW2 chat room) somebody referred to “gulping from the fire hose of ideas”. Going from reading blogs to actively participating in Twitter is like going from the garden hose to the firehose. In reading blogs I could pick up an idea here, and idea there. With Twitter, it is a constant flow, in real time. Really smart people, talking in real time to other really smart people and posting links about what they are checking out. The pace of new ideas has grown exponentially. I found I had to rethink and redesign my delicious tagging system to help keep track.

2) People Like Me / The Stupidest Guy in the Room. Twitter has provided a view into other professional’s lives. They all do not do exactly the same job as me but as others have tweeted I have found that lots of other tech educators are like me. They have their computers on beyond work hours. They work hard at their jobs in the hours beyond work. They try to balance family and technology. I am not nuts to do what I do. There are people like me out there. Lots of folks are puzzled, confused and trying to make sense of all of this stuff, and working hard outside of school to try new things and work it all out. They are thoughtful, wise, kind, and funny.

In my pond, I am often seen (with respect to technology), as the “guru wizard” who reveals the “magic things” that happen inside the box and out on the web. I am not smarter than anybody else, I am just a teacher who has chosen to get paid for paying closer attention to technology. And yet the blogoshpere and twitterverse have shown me that there is so much more happening with people who are sharper than me, who have wrapped their brains tighter around the salient ideas, and are moving in directions that I never could have imagined. It is as if I have gone from swimming in my pond to stepping into the water at a large lakeside beach. I am in just up to my ankles in the cold water, and there are people doing backflips off the raft. I am standing there wondering how, and if I should walk in up to my waist. I know I am at an exciting place to swim, but will I ever be able to get to the raft? Sometimes it is an exciting, challenging, anxiety provoking thought to realize that you are the stupidest guy in the room.

3) Twitter Manners / Friendship. This is the most intriguing part of Jen’s discussion and replies. It is a social give and take that makes a lot of Web 2.0 all work. It is like a virtual staff room as some have said. That is hard for me. I am terminally shy in real life and perhaps more so in a virtual environment. In my real staff rooms I am the quiet guy reading the paper. I am a listener and lurker in SL and in live chat areas. I read blogs but comment only if I have something really unique to say. I am flattered when folks follow me on Twitter, and I always add folks as followers (on a recent This Week in Tech podcast – Jason Calacanis (Mahalo.com) talked about the value added of web geek, Robert Scoble w/ a following of 6500+ twitters, and who always allows folks to follow him and follows all people who follow him, by saying that he could parlay that into value for anybody who hires him. He has a social roladex he can exploit easily by tweeting about a site he likes and driving web traffic. Essentially saying that social network contacts like Twitter can be monetized).

However after you are following somebody, and a bunch of folks are following you what is the correct behavior for tweeting? Miguel Guhlin said that he looks at Twitter as the ebb and flow of human contact and enjoys the casual updates. He looks to the person’s blog as a way to understand more about them and what they are into. He tends to do the follower/followee by checking to see if the person is an educational blogger to help narrow his focus. That seems reasonable (however, it is cool to follow people like Veronica Belmont, and there are people I only know by tweet that I have come to respect).

Should I then limit my tweets to educational matters? Do you tweet at the personal level, and then blog at an intellectual level? Am I the ultimate bore when I tweet all weekend long about football, or my running, or doing my chores? Is this just my poor social skills that I am throwing myself out there saying – look at me? Look at what I am doing? Anybody?

It is a curious mix in the twitterverse. I agree with most of the folks on friendship. I have been socially blogging long enough to know that electronic “friendships” do come and go. People that I got to “know” a little bit at a personal level stop blogging or stop commenting on my blog (my social blog revolves mostly around cycling and sports).
Is this different at a professional level?

Most likely I will see you at a conference and we will introduce ourselves, or we will have an exchange online that will lead to another exchange, kind of like in real life. If that blossoms, it blossoms. I do not need intimacy to feel that what I learn from you in Twitter/Ning/Blogs/SL is valuable. And maybe that is my social shyness talking. I am not going to Skype/contact you unless I have a reason, and it is ok if you blow me off.

4) Addiction/Distraction. This is bothersome to me as is the whole wired 24/7/365 nature of where we are going. Part of the power of Twitter is its addictive nature. I am not sure of how it is much different than IM, except for this sweet spot in time there is this group of tech ed folks who have gravitated here. Is it just trendy like mySpace giving way to Live Journal to Facebook to Ning? Will it be Twitter to Pounce, to Jaiku to back to Twitter for the edtech community? It was for Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech Folks.

In the same way my 16 year old has to have her AIM up when she works, I now find that Twitter is up on my laptop all the time when I am at home. Somehow I “need” to see what everybody is saying, is doing. Why is that? Two months ago I did not “need” that. I have had a Twitter account for a while. I did not use it until I caught some of the buzz.

It is a distraction. It is funny as I sit here writing away on this Sunday the “tweets” are flying by about the post and replies. No less than 6 times have I stopped to checkout what others are saying about 140 characters. A couple of times I have almost stopped because I thought somebody had already said what I was currently writing about much better than me. I could never open up Twitter if I had “real” work to get done.

I could never connect to it at work. I have enough trouble keeping up with incoming emails disrupting my workflow. There is an organizational guru who says that you should only check your work email twice a day. Once about 10AM, and another about an hour before you go home. I am seriously thinking that I will adopt that rule for December and just concentrate on the to do list for the day. I can’t imagine if I had Twitter popping up all day.

So I get to the end, without the profundity I desired and probably saying everything that others have said in different words. But, the conversation struck chords in my mind and it is now out of my head and on a page. I believe the writing helped me to put some form to my thoughts and I think I will return to this conversation in my head soon, now with some type of frame to hang it on. Thanks for listening.

Cross Posted in Life in the Fast Lane