Ignoring Your Friends on Twitter

An intriguing new Twitter application, Muuter, recently made its debut. It allows users to ignore anyone they are following on Twitter for a limited amount of time. The target audience? Anyone who has a friend on Twitter who is asking too many questions, sharing too much of his or her daily minutia, or providing an ongoing commentary that one cares little about. The Muuter Help page offers this explanation:

We've all been there: two of your friends start an argument, or someone is at an event and they NEED to tweet everything back, or going phone-picture-crazy. Whatever the reason, they seem to be all over your timeline, jumping at your screen.

Not to mention that if you do it manually and unfollow the -temporarily- loud twitterers, you risk forgetting to follow them back again.

So here is muuter to help you. With muuter you can tell us to mute your friend for some hours, and we'll take care of the rest.

As technology has advanced in the modern era, the intimacy and immediacy of how we communicate with others continues to increase. Along with that, however, has been the risk of information overload, sometimes referred to as infomania. This malady is described on Wikipedia as "the debilitating state of information overload, caused by the combination of a backlog of information to process (usually in email), and continuous interruptions from technologies like phones, instant messaging, and email."

Shutting off or reducing communication with others every so often is necessary for one's mental well-being. Multitasking over different media, while praised by most employers as a way to increase productivity, has actually been proven to be debilitating to one's mental acuity over time. But to focus on a particular task, a person runs the risk of offending friends and co-workers who are expecting immediate access to one's attention.

The traditional forms of mass communication are impersonal and thus easy to ignore without any ramifications. If the radio or television becomes an obstreperous presence, one can simply turn them off without offending the broadcaster, who is none the wiser and does not care about the identity of specific individuals listening in the first place.

Communicating by telephone offered a different challenge to ignoring one's friends. For many years, the only foolproof way was not to answer any incoming calls. But that ran the risk of missing calls from those with whom one actually does want to communicate. Answering machines allowed the screening of calls, but it wasn't until the advent of Caller ID did it become simple and generally accepted to choose selectively with whom one wants to speak.

The advent of the Internet offers its own challenges. With email, one can either close the application that gathers the messages or simply choose to read them at a later time. It is implicit to email that the communication is not necessarily immediate; offense is not given easily if messages sit in the inbox unread. In any event, it is rare that an acquaintance can send so many emails at one time to cause such annoyance.

Now, in this age of instant communication, ignoring others presents a more delicate dilemma. Twitter, in particular, is at once both passive and insidious with its constant stream of messages whose mere presence can cause distraction. Controlling this stream by un-following others, however, carries with it the risk of hurt feelings or misinterpretation. Up until now, the only alternative was to turn off the Twitter stream completely, which runs the risk of missing a tweet that one desires to read.

So now, with the help of Muuter, the solution to this conundrum is available to all. With its use always on a temporary basis, the chances of offending others are limited; it is practically undetectable by those being targeted. Infomania is reduced, however little, for the time being. Perhaps this is a sign of Twitter emerging as a more mature technology. It has become so popular that ways must be found to ignore one's own friends who use it.

Comments

[Gordon]

I have an alternative, rather straightforward solution. I only accept friend requests or invite people to my Myspace site whom I actually want to communicate with. On Twitter, I have twelve or so friends and a few celebrities and leave it at that. I learned a long time ago that becoming real popular was... exhausting. Perhaps there is a way, out there somewhere, to make more compelling the notion that one's personal value does not lie in the number of friends one can amass but in the quality of such friendships as one maintains.

[Gordon]

oops 'with whom I want to communicate'
With reference to the piece which follows that above, over-hasty communication has worse perils than the snark: bad grammar ;p