I too recently broke up with, or drove a stake through the heart of my Facebook account. Skipping the rationalizations, it boiled down to my gut instinct– I did not like (nor trust) Facebook. Yes, we get tracked in Google, twitter, Amazon, every site we visit that reads and stores cookie files, but it came down to a basic dis”like”.

And I too would write a love letter for twitter, and many things it has brought me, enabled. There are more people than I could mention whom I would never have had much or any connection with, that has been enabled in twitter.

I cannot think of a single new person, colleague that I have made a connection with via Facebook.

Maybe I did it wrong.

I do not like pulling out the “what if a future employer found your less flattering escapades” card; yet know it has had impact on people. The reason is, taken to the converse, it says we should only construct perfect mirror reflections, flawless, of ourselves online. And twitter has, as its attribute, that people’s human-ness, both positive and flawed flow on through.

But to me I think these difficult situations beat some considering of **intent**. I cannot claim to do it all the time, but it does help, before clicking the tweet, send button, to really reflect on what you are trying to communicate. I’ve not seen much of Salaita’s tweets, but get the impression it was relentless, and even that example read above, has to make me wonder what the intent was. It’s one thing to blurt out something representing your frustration, anger with a situation, but to lace it with venom or spite or jst a continual barrage suggests perhaps a different intent to represent an emotion. I have no idea what at Salaita’s intent was, and can only make wild conjectures.

But I know my own intents, and have quite a few memories of times I started to write something and just deleted it. Not because I feared I may never get a job, just that I found what I was thinking might be clever or get a reaction, was, well not worth even saying. I had to stop and ask myself, “What exactly are you hoping to tell people?”

So its more a matter of considering those acerbic witty word daggers and applying a bit of Golden Rule, or think about reading it to your mother/child.

It’s about being a flawed, but also trying to be decent respectful human. Sometimes its just better to live with your thoughts than to blurt them out.