In June 2007, Ian McCarthy and I started performing Wandering Rocks on Twitter each Bloomsday. My original explanation of our project began with the phrase "I do not like Twitter."

I hadn't realized it until today, but back in June (almost exactly two years after our first effort), my name appeared on a list of 100 Educators to Follow on Twitter. In the years between those two Junes, I took Brenda Brathwaite's suggestion to use Twitter in earnest. Given my field of study, it did seem irresponsible not to have some first-hand idea about Twitter, how it worked, and why people liked it (I originally joined Facebook for similar reasons, back before everybody on the planet had an account).

It's a weird list. I'm not sure how one qualifies as an "educator," but the folks who put it together don't seem to require that someone be a full-time teacher or professor to qualify. I think they're right, and I suppose that's part of the lesson to take away from the list. One of the failings of higher education can be found in our overall tendency to avoid public conversations in favor of private ones.

Today I found out that I'm also on Kotaku's Guide to Video Game Twitterers, among a bevvy of well-respected developers, journalists, critics, and other industry personalities. Clearly my relationship with the service has changed.

Despite the welcome attention, Twitter still feels like a mixed bag to me. I wonder if it is a compulsion more than a utility or an entertainment service, even if it has been legitimately helpful to me at times. Mostly, I want to understand it more fully, and so I'll keep at it.

As I reflect on my Twitter use, I am reminded of what might be the most interesting experience I have had on the service. Right around the time the 100 Educators to Follow was published, Matthew Kaplan developed an acute distaste for me. The situation was this: I had posted the following tweet:

Is there anything more interesting than all those "New blog post" tweets? Look at me, look at me, look at me!

I was referring to those auto-postings from Wordpress that simply point to a blog post the author has just written. They strike me as precisely the kind of self-promotional identity masturbation I had originally criticized in Bloomsday on Twitter. Unfortunately, Kaplan took it personally (it was probably a case of bad timing; perhaps he'd just posted such a tweet) and wrote an impassioned and humbling screed against me. I say it was humbling because he obviously really admired me, and I had lost considerable face in his mind. It was an overreaction, of course, but it gave me pause. 140 characters isn't enough to say anything subtle.

For my part, Mark Nelson's comment on Kaplan's blog pretty well summarizes my own sense of myself:

A bit late on this, but I have a hard time seeing Bogost as a creator or defender of any sort of academic caste system. Are you sure you aren't reading something into this that isn't there, ascribing a looking-down-at-little-people motivation to a snide comment when it's really just that Bogost directs snide comments at important and unimportant people alike?

And for what it's worth, the individual who originally inspired my ire for "New Blog Post" ostentation was none other than Raph Koster. If I were posting an explanation on Twitter, all I could muster would be something like, "Sorry Raph, you were more interesting when you were a game designer and author instead of a web 2.0 entrepreneur." But since I have additional room here, I'll try something more subtle:

Raph, I used to love reading your blog, and I've gotten a lot out of your book too. Even though I disagree with many things you say, those disagreements used to be intellectually stimulating. I still use your book and some of your writing in my teaching (particularly Moore's Wall: Technology Advances and Online Game Design). But since you started Metaplace, you mostly write and talk about the service, make announcements, pimp new features. It feels like one extended press release. I miss hearing your ideas and provocations in longform. Indeed, when I think about the Web 2.0 user-generated content craze, I sometimes reflect on you as an example of the dangers of "facilitating creativity among the masses." What is lost when we focus our time and energy on "democratizing" tools? Many things I'm sure, but for one: the time that the smart, creative individuals who make those tools used to spend making ideas and artifacts instead.

That's one thousand more than 140 characters, in case anyone's counting. And it's still too short to do the intellectual work to which it aspires.