man hiding from twitter

This is my third post in a row about Twitter. I don’t intend for this to be a Twitter blog, but I guess because I’ve been so into Twitter lately, it’s just often on my mind.

 
Ok, so what’s for today.

 
Recently I realized that tweeting a lot carries with it both professional and personal hazards. I guess this is also true for Facebook, but since my profile has never been public, I never actually felt it.

 
The problem is this: you receive an email, a phone call or a message telling you “this is urgent, deal with it NOW”. Normally, I – and I assume you too – prioritize. If it’s truly urgent, I do it immediately. If it’s not, it waits a bit. Sometimes even slightly longer than a bit. I believe the vast majority of time I am able to get whatever I need to do in a the right amount of time, so that’s fine.

 
However, when you Twitter a lot, it’s kind of hard to hide what you’re doing since it’s all so public. Here are two examples.

 
Question: “Say, didn’t you said you’re going to visit your parents? How come you were Tweeting about watching TV at home?”
Udi: “Emmm…”.

 
Question: “Say, didn’t you say you were going to return that email ASAP? How come you were quoting Robin Williams in Twitter?”
Udi: “Emmm…”.

 
And the worst of all:

 
Question: “Say, didn’t you say you’re too busy to take our son from daycare? How come you were tweeting with that cute girl with the name I can’t remember?”
Udi: “Emmm……*slight note of fear*”.

 
What makes it worse for me is that in my ‘stupidity’, I actually added my last tweets to my blog (see top right corner), and each includes message and time. So you don’t even to be familiar with Twitter. My mother can go to my website and see exactly whether I’m home (if there’s no Tweet for 5 hours, I’m either extremely busy or not home). I can already imagine the questions: “you were home and you didn’t pick up the phone. I am SO disappointed in you, my eldest son.”

 
This creates problems, as you can imagine. Moreover, as the world becomes more connected, i.e. some personal gadgets can tell where you currently are (for example geo-location is available on cell phones, and certain iPhone applications use that), we lose more and more of our privacy.

 
Until now I was fairly immune to this, but I guess this is a major change, and by actually writing about this, I’m exposing myself to more scrutiny (since some friends/family haven’t thought about this). In my specific case, I can always say tweeting is part of my work (and that should get me off the hook, though I’ll probably have a hard time convincing my parents this is indeed true!)

 
Ah, the problems of the the second decade (almost) of the 21st century. I wonder what the future holds. I’m sure we’ll adapt and our kids will find it hard to believe this was actually not a problem once (just like teenagers nowadays can’t imagine the time their parents not being available on a cell phone when they were their age).

 
Personally, I can’t wait to see what happens next! I just hope some shred of privacy remains.