Many years ago, the last time I was actively blogging, I had a Twitter account. I was connected with most of the Blogging Tories, and following not a few Twitter feeds in the mainstream media (Canadian and American), and things were good.

However, a couple of years ago, the IT people at the government department I work at decided that Twitter had become so toxic that it would no longer be suitable for work. And so everyone lost access to Twitter via their workstations, though they still had access on their own private accounts.

Frankly I don’t blame the IT people for thinking the way they did, and do. I also noticed that I wasn’t writing as many tweets as I used to, since my own nature makes me a net consumer of online information rather than a net producer. So, last year, I decided to cancel my Twitter account.

I will say this much: it was much easier than my attempts to cancel basic cable. It seems that Canadian cable service technical support is more interested in trying to sell you more services than actually helping you do what you want to do.

Actually I don’t miss Twitter. You can only say so much in 140 characters, and a good deal of the time, most Twitter users seem to have turned off their judgement whenever they post a tweet. Spur-of-the-moment responses may get more traffic, but they won’t make the universal conversation any more civilized.