As many of you know I use Twitter and I tend to be a political junkie. After a career as an information analyst I am also an information junkie however I also insist on verifying my information sources. One of the big issues in this age of information is that there is a lot of misinformation out there. It becomes a “personal responsibility” to check your facts before adopting the message. If you don’t then you just become a victim of indoctrination rather than informed. Or even worse, an ideological sheep who just follows blindly!
Twitter, a vehicle for sending quick and targeted messages, doesn’t allow a lot of room for interpretation with only 144 characters (now that is characters and not words). Tweets, as I have written about before, are not meant to be a conversation but just a quick review. Often I will tweet a news story I have come across and include the link to the story. This is one way of including some substantiation to a tweet.
Twitter accounts also have “followers”, those people who have chosen to receive your tweets possibly because of like minded thinking. I don’t have a lot of followers however some of the people that follow me have hundreds of thousands of followers so I am able to reach out to those people as well. One person that follows me (and I follow him) has 1.3 million followers so that is quite an electronic reach. Remember there are millions and millions of Twitter accounts so the chance of stumbling on any particular tweet is pretty remote.
As a political junkie I try to watch Power & Politics everyday on CBC. It’s a live production so viewers are able to tweet comments to the show in real time. This gives people an opportunity to make their voice heard on any issues of interest. I do that often and I generally tweet based on information that is relative to what the speakers may be speaking about. One of the things I am very aware of is how information is packaged and I have no issues in challenging misleading statements, comments that are based on misdirection or presentations used out of context. That happens a lot.
Now as I stated earlier it is very difficult to stumble onto a tweet but much easier when it is targeted at a show like Power & Politics. I usually don’t respond to tweets because, as I indicated in my other article about Twitter, tweets are not designed to an informed conversation. Sometimes I do get responses from people who I have never heard of before and do not follow my account. This was one from the other day. I am sharing it because there is an issue with Twitter and that is Twitter stalkers. These tend to be people who are so ideologically driven that anything they see as a threat to there particular way of life is just not acceptable at all. What makes it worse is that often these are people who profess to be staunch supporters of democracy!
@Druids Caught your tweets on PnP over the last few weeks, so read a few more. You seem to be a typical angry, CBC left wing partisan.
I generally rule out any type of credibility the minute the whole “left versus right” issue is raised. I grew up in a Canada where the centrist approach was considered the best. My dad voted Liberal and my mother voted PC so politics was pretty balanced in my household. We were what I would have considered a pretty normal 50’s and 60’s prairie farm family.
People that know me are also aware that as a polio survivor I have been a staunch fighter and supporter of individual rights for the better part of my life. So when I see stories like this one where a family has had to fight the federal government to receive support for their disabled son yes I get angry. Or when I see veterans suffering PTSD being given their eviction notice because they have just received a service dog to assist with their rehabilitation, yes I get angry.
I also feel sadness for many people. When your life is based on finding tweets so you can denigrate someone I would suggest you re-evaluate your love of golf, bird watching and democracy. Stumbling across someones tweet is to be expected. Going out of your way to denigrate that individual is quite another. That type of behaviour is not conducive to democracy and it is not something I will sit ideally by without making my own comment about it. If I am coming by as angry, well that tweet made me angry. What makes me even angrier is that I actually let this persons comment have an impact on my feelings. I’m not who usually give away my emotional control to others.
Just one man’s opinion
Terry Wiens - A Poster Child's Perspective 