One of the questions I get asked most about Twitter and other social media — whether from friends or from people I’m training– is, “Okay, I understand how it technically works now, but how do you handle that flood of information coming your way? It would drive me crazy to try and keep track of x number of people!”

Yes! I agree!

If I actually tried to stay on top of the 200+ people and conversations I’m following on Twitter, I would: (a) never get any work done, (b) go slightly bonkers, and thus (c) be rendered homeless quite fast. The trick is that I’m not actually paying that much attention to all those people. (Sorry, people I follow.)

The paradigm of email being our main form of digital communication for the past 10+ years (at least in the mainstream) has created this sense that every message appearing in front of our faces is significantly important enough to demand our attention. As social media expands, nothing could be further from the truth. We are presented with the opportunity to reach numbers of people that previously was technologically impossible. That doesn’t mean we have to pay attention to them all.

In the case of Twitter, I like to think of it as my personal water cooler in the break room– when I’m bored or otherwise off on an ADD jaunt, I stop by here and listen to what other people are talking about at the moment. If something interesting or funny just happened, I pop my head into the group and tell them. (“A guy wearing boxers on the outside of his pants carrying a 1984 boombox blaring Michael Jackson just danced with me on Houston St.”)

There are some decisions I’ve made about my Twitter use that have helped me to keep enjoying it as a helpful tool:

• I don’t try to figure out all the conversations that were happening before I stopped by. Unless there’s some heated, heavy-duty discussion happening, I don’t go back in time and try to find out what everyone’s said since I last checked.
• I’ve accepted that there will be some things that I miss. I generally rely on “retweets” — denoted by RT or rtwt — to keep me abreast of really important news or funnies.
• I search for my username to look for people replying or referring to me. I want to be polite and respond to people talking to me as much as possible. You can save an RSS feed of the search results so you don’t have to keep checking the webpage.
• I’m selective about who I follow and unfollow. I don’t follow everyone that follows me, and I unfollow people who overwhelm my stream. This comes across to some as rude or unkind in the new paradigm, but I don’t subscribe to that belief. I don’t expect everyone that follows me to stay interested in my tweets about just how hilarious and weird my friends and dog are. I don’t expect them to be interested in every meeting or conference that I decide to live-tweet. Like most relationships, we need to work on our expectation management and boundaries in the social media sphere. I wrote a post about this last year.

The biggest thing I like to stress to people who ask me these things is that Twitter (and other tools like it) are tools for enhancing your communication and relationships — not destroying your sanity trying to keep up with everything. You should use them how you see fit, and not be afraid to make your own rules for your relationships– just as you would offline, so can you online.

Yesterday, Allyson Kapin of Rad Campaign and Women Who Tech pointed to the supposed Ten Commandments of Twitter and wondered how many we agreed with. Me? Some, I guess, but it got me thinking first about Twitter etiquette (Twitterquette? sounds like a dessert or a lawn game), and then other old and new netiquette issues.

It’s fascinating to watch unspoken rules evolve in new social systems over time, and then curmudgeonly frustrating when someone tries to write them down. I can see how religions all over the world got themselves into trouble early on. “Wait, when he said ‘honor thy father and mother,’ does that mean I have to go over for dinner every Sunday? Seriously?” I admire the TenCommandments dude for giving it a shot, but… yeah. Telling people how to act is going to irritate some of the people some of the time.

It’s curious to me because I’m a firm believer in using the tools however best you see fit, whatever fits your info-digestion style. Me, I use Twitter mostly to follow people I know in person (I’m training myself to finally stop saying “in real life,” btw, since it’s all real life), and a little bit to get breaking news. It’s been indicated to me in a passive way that I’m not participating in good Twitter karma by following everyone that follows me. There’s even an app that will check your mutual status called Twitter Karma. It’s a bogus “rule” slowly being imposed on a nascent system of social transactions.

It reminds me of 1994, when if you didn’t link back to someone in your little HTML page of family photos, there was bad blood between you after that. People, people, people! Come on. First of all, we’re all adults here. I see people I’m close with, that I’m following, that are not following me back. I know there’s a 99% chance it’s because I tweet too much for their diet, or their community, and I can understand that. (In fact, I’m going to have to clean out some high-volume tweeters this weekend myself.) The point is not for me to thus impose a new rule to counteract the karma rule, but to ask people to live and let live.

We all have different styles of communicating, yes? This is a point we can agree on? In fact, when I’m doing trainings and workshops on using new tools, it’s one of my main points: don’t let anyone else tell you how best to use the tool. Sure, you can take suggestions or follow someone’s lead. I’ve showed people how to use Twitter just to read news feeds, or just to know what their friends are up to, or to stay on top of tech trends.

In the end, social rules are going to evolve no matter what I say (le sigh, my power is not yet infinite and cosmic), and it’s going to be fun to watch these new sets play out. It’s kinda funny that, even after 20 years, you can still make a major social faux pax by not emailing someone back. We come up with all kinds of reasons in our little overactive brains: “she’s pissed at something I said,” “she never got the email,” “he never really loved me.” Maybe they just… forgot.