Immediacy

This is my first text in English in this blog. My previous policy regarding this blog was to write in Portuguese (PT-PT). When I created my Twitter account I decided to follow an language-flexible policy. Portugal related entries I write in Portuguese, otherwise in English. This may not work that well for international readers, but I think it works fine for Portuguese Internet dwellers. And anyway, I'm not exactly trying to captivate a network of followers so I'll do as it damn well pleases me. One thing that has always amused/surprised me was how one so easily falls into a set of self defined boundaries in terms of the published contents. One of the reasons this blog is anonimous is because when I created it I decided that I would write about anything I wished. So I would write about social issues, politics, movies, whatever, as pretty much everyone does, but I would also write the most pornographic stories that came to mind. Well, if you (an eventual reader of this blog entry) cares to take the effort of googling this blog you'll find exactly zero entries with such content. Why? Was it because no pornographic issues crossed my mind in more than 2 years of blogging? Well, nothing couldn't be further from the truth. I think that the main reason is that as time passes and you start getting regular visits from other bloggers you sort of don't feel comfortable showing them that side of your mind. So you unconsciously define a set of rules and just follow them. It seems to me that the best approach if one wants to have a serious blog and still write about such stuff is to build another persona and another blog and with it a newly created freedom will be available. This is just an opinion, of course. People should do whatever feels right for them.

Well, look at that. I wanted to write about the immediacy of twitter versus the more thought out stage of blogging and I ended up all that as an introduction. Anyway, better late then never. When I started a Twitter account I was pleased by the freedom it offered. I mean, there's a limited ammount of ignorance you can insert in 140 characters. And that sort of protects you a lot. After all, when I used to blog it took me a lot of time to research stuff so that commentators couldn't simply point out a non-fact or a lie. In twitter you don't really commit that much. There is no space for very elaborated thoughts and it's hard to discuss matters with other people. So the 140 characters are pretty much ok for a "what are you doing?" but not very good for "what do you think about the state of the world?". OTOH, Twitter is very good for "what is happening as we speak" while blogging is better for "what is the background of what just happened?". So, all in all, these two tools of the Web 2.0 are complementary. And Twitter is also a very good as a blog promotion tool, so one ends up working as a percursor of the other.