Social Media Breakups are Awkward

Recently I direct messaged someone (and note, I virtually never DM people) I'm connected with on Twitter, an old co-worker of mine, to see if there was any chance of summer work at the company she is with. A company run by another old co-worker of mine, by the way. See, I work in the school system and have summers off so I was trying to get some income during my summer break.

She responded that things slow down in the summer but she'd let me know if anything did come up.

And then she unfollowed me.

Thoughts About the Immediacy of New Media

Watch your step (and your words).

My mother, ever the instigator of thoughts, emailed me Nir Rosen's response on Salon to the demise of his career for being thoughtless in his Twitter comments about the violent sexual assault on Lara Logan in Egypt. This is my response.

While I think the new social media makes it easier to be a thoughtless jerk, I don't think it changes people from being kind, considerate people to being thoughtless jerks.

With every revolution in communication there is a period when that medium's newness overrides people's need to think before they hit send or post. And, in the process of that new media becoming a mainstream communications medium, cautionary tales of missteps, stumbles, falls and outright career implosions will be the result.