I know this may come as a shock to most of you, but I kind of enjoy Twitter. I've written here and elsewhere about the people brought into my days and into my life in 140 character bursts. I consider people I've never met members of my inner circle, and there are people who live in Twitter who know stories about me my best "irl" friends will never hear. I've met a fair number of you in actual 3D social situations, and most of you have been seemingly normal, well-adjusted members of polite society. Others? You can't win 'em all I guess.
The beautiful thing about Twitter is that users can shape their experience however we fancy. On Face book (like the space will keep the bots away), you have to more or less start with you. There's the obligatory friending of family members, college friends, weird kids from high school who got weirder, or god forbid coworkers. You can choose to only lurk, participate sparingly by adding some profile information and posting every now and then, or go all in like my family members who think status updates have a 3 paragraph minimum. In any case, there's a certain down payment made to join Facebook. Even lurkers generally use their real name, since Face book friending is a two-way street and lurking on no one isn't of any use.
Twitter users can more or less choose their level of involvement from egg-avi nothingness up to full-bodied swan dives into the suck. You can be yourself, or a version of yourself, or a barely-recognizable version of yourself masquerading as someone else entirely. You can follow hundreds of accounts you find interesting and only consume. Or you can live-tweet every aspect of your day with completely unwanted levels of detail. Or anywhere in between. Other users then decide if you're someone they want in their feed. For me, the level of detail (or anonymity) is irrelevant to how interesting I find someone. Some of my favorite tweeters are people I've known for 10+ years and others I've only grown to know in 140 character bursts. You can learn an awful lot about someone 140 characters at a time, regardless of how many personal details they reveal. I've had people ask me about "Twitter friends" and if I actually know any of the people I interact with. Real names, locations, and workplaces on my timeline are much less prevalent than thoughts on humanity, spirituality, food, and most importantly sports. The question I'd ask of those asking me about my "Twitter friends" is this: how many "real-life friends" do you know if the criteria is the first set vs the second?
People choose to be anonymous for a whole list of reasons which need not be repeated here and don't much matter anyway. Anonymity, just like following or unfollowing or tweeting that baller cheeseburger you just ate, is a choice. They aren't doing the world a disservice by putting distance between their personal details and those they broadcast. And most importantly, anonymity isn't a personal slight against anyone. If you have a problem with someone's level of anonymity, do yourself and the rest of us a favor and unfollow them.
I can abide by many things on Twitter (lord knows my followers do), but my one instaban trigger is even remotely outing someone who doesn't want to be outed. Whether the info was come by via that person directly, or someone else indirectly, or just good old fashioned Google stalking, releasing it to even one person says a lot more about the outer than the outed. Even trying to find info on someone who's guarded about their anonymity says "I want to alter this person's level of involvement, even just in my own mind." That violates one of the coolest rules about Twitter: that anyone can be any version of themselves they want. If everyone on Twitter were more open about their personal details, Mark Zuckerberg would already be getting out his checkbook. It wouldn't be as fun, and I doubt it would be as personal. Some people are willing to share a lot more when their personal lives aren't on the line, and, for me, that's what makes Twitter great.
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