This post first appeared on aud.life

This comment was posted on Jon Becker’s blog.

How do we separate the “personal” from the “professional”? I’m not sure it’s ever possible; I don’t think it would be desirable.

There are lots of times I see Tweets on topics I don’t care about: television shows, awards shows, baseball games, presidential debates, and so on. It’s not that hard to ignore them. (I use Tweetbot, for what it’s worth, which does make it easy to mute individuals and mute hashtags.) Me, I’m far more likely to unfollow educators who tweet uncritically about ed-tech than I am to unfollow those who tweet about breakfast or basketball.

What I find interesting about your comments here are that you feel as though you are not a part of a sports-Twitter community in quite the same way as you are the education-Twitter one (and perhaps, by extension, that being more a part of the former diminishes your position in the latter). But do you think these two communities have similar practices, shared values? Do you think “community” looks the same when it comes to talking about these two topics on Twitter? How are they shaped – differently? – by loyalty, by fandom (and I realize that’s just one small part of sports-Twitter and, arguably, one small part of education-Twitter too)? How are they shaped by collaboration and not competition?

I wonder if, even with a sports-focused account, you’d find the same sort of connection via sports-Twitter that you’ve found via education-related circles.