There seems to be quite a backlash on this topic, stateside.
See e.g. http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Tweckling-Twitterfolk-/8895/
James Cummings wrote:
On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 11:41, O'Donnell, Dan daniel.odonnell@uleth.ca wrote:
If I might add one comment born of unfortunately hard experience at the TEI: please remember that postings to a dm twitter feed are public and reflect on us as a community. It is easy to end up criticising people more harshly than you realise!
Hello Dan,
Have no fear. Currently the 'DigitalMedieval' twitter feed is set up only to forward DM's news feed (and twitterfeed.com seems to be being highly selective in forgetting to forward some things in any case!) so anything posted has to undergo the same moderation as posting news items (approval by a number of volunteers on the board). As the person who set up the account I can, if necessary, post something manually. In my announcement of it when I suggested that we might add something extra to it during conferences, I was only thinking we might update it with reminders of important digital/medieval sessions or something like that. I don't think anyone would suggest using any of the official DM channels for criticising anyone, at any point!
But otherwise I'd say that what people post on their very own non-official twitter feeds, facebook statuses, blogs, webpages, or bulletin boards is a matter for their own consciences. (It is perhaps interesting to note the different modes of writing people use in such things, compared to email and traditional publication, but that is, of course, a different conversation.)
-James
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