I have so many different worlds that collide on the internet. I have a wide array of things that I’m passionate about, and on some mediums I talk without holding back on most of those things all at once. Take for example, my Twitter. Look at some of the subjects I’ve talked about in the past two weeks.
- My company’s product, Metaplace. I love what we’re making, and I chat about it from time to time (generally, as unrepresentatively and non-official as is feasibly possible)
- GLBT civil rights and equality. Another subject I feel strongly about.
- My RL day to day happenings.
- Equestrian/horses.
- Video games/MMOs. One of my biggest hobbies and loves of my life.
- Web products. I love to try new things and post about them.
- Indie music.
All of those bullet points represent different worlds for me. I have people who read my Twitter or my Facebook status updates because they know me for one of those things. I have my RL friends and family. There’s all the people who know me from Cuppycake.org and really only care about what I say about the gaming industry. There are those in the tech news world who follow me because I’ve given them props. There’s Metaplace enthusiasts who have no idea who I am other than the Community Manager for MP. There are many gays, lesbians, transgender people, and their supporters who follow me for my blogs, tweets, and photos from San Diego equality events. I run a website for horse enthusiasts in the Midwest to get together and chat with each other on a forum - so I have the equestrians as well who follow me.
Sometimes I wonder with each tweet - of the 439 people who follow me, how many care about this particular subject? How many of them are offended by the content matter? How many people consider unfollowing me because I’m not tweeting about what they thought I’d be tweeting about?
I certainly can’t make different accounts for each hobby I’m interested in. I can’t try to maintain separate lists of friends because obviously, barriers drop and people cross over the line and it gets blurred. I can’t really even screen my followers because people know me from so many different avenues that I can’t keep track. I’ve never said that my Twitter account is any sort of an official capacity. It’s probably the best representation of what is “ME”. No one is really a one track kind of person, and I have a ton of things I’m interested in and like to talk about.
Is Twitter the place to just be you? Is it the place to talk about what you want to talk about without consideration of your audience? Blogs are a much more black/white issue, because the gaming people read my gaming blog, the RL people read my Tumblr, the horse people read the Midwest Horse Talk forums, etc. and my worlds aren’t crashing into each other. Twitter is a different beast all together that has successfully brought in almost everyone I know from many different sources.
My solution is not to change. My Twitter account (@cuppy) is me, it’s the total package of what my life is about. It’s games, music, culture, hobbies, and vision. I wish I could fit this all into 140 characters. :)
