For the last few weeks, when I run across an interesting article or memo, I post a link to it on my Twitter feed. I appreciate the ease and rapidity of the Twitter service, and I find its 140 character limit a useful oulipo exercise that can beneficially tone one’s writing, so I encourage you to follow my feed for up-to-the-minute, if cryptic, insights into what I’m reading.
But I do have concerns with the whole Twitter thing.
For one, there’s the self-consciously-cute Tweety bird-inspired name, and how it tempts the weaker-willed among its users to start inserting “tw” before words where it does not belong. For instance, on Twitter a “trend” quickly becomes a “twend.” Bruce Carton is vigilant in stamping out these twendencies (damn, it’s even affecting me!), but one has to wonder whether this Twitter thing, or twing, is just so virulent that it would be best for the civilization if we just pulled the plug and shut it down.
When you log into Twitter, it asks you “What are you doing?” My first thought is “none of your business.” I’m mature and self-aware enough to know that no one cares what I am doing. And if you do, you shouldn’t.
I guess I just don’t get the Twitter mentality. Something about its breezy content-free instant-gratification self-centered ethos rubs me the wrong way. So instead I just post links. While this works for me, it is an uneasy accommodation.
As I agonize over this philosophical quandary, I’ve decided to repost my Twitter links here a few times each week for the benefit of those of you who don’t see yourselves becoming twits. So here, ripped from the pages of my Twitter feed, are some of my recent tweets:
Duke Law student takes on Milberg Weiss, former partner fires back. My question: Was the DOJ’s investigation really “beside the point”?
The Atlantic: “Do CEOs Matter?” Cites Great Man Theory to explain. Sounds familiar?
Why put an outside CEO on your company’s board? To boost your company’s status, not its performance. So says this paper.
Ezra Klein: boards have escaped blame because of the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” But I doubt they’ll escape.
James Surowiecki in the New Yorker: resurrects Gilson and Kraakman’s call for the creation of a “cadre of full-time directors.” But don’t we pretty much have that already?