Yes, it's mainly the Midwestern Ethos thing talking, but I don't like having to block anyone on Twitter or elsewhere. Yet in the last two days I've had to block five followers. Mind you, it was likely only one follower, namely a porn-bot with more pseudonyms than Natty Bumppo.
But still. Slamming the porch door in someone's face just goes against the grain, y'know? I keep expecting Mom or one of her formidable sisters to chew me out for it. I hate that kind of cognitive dissonance: Don't make me go there!
The motto of the so-called Social Web should be: Interact or stay home. Because the bottom line is that human beings don't "scale," as we say in programming. The interaction itself is--to at least some degree--the value-add. We're wired that way. Period. The cleverest speech-recognition-driven "Customer Service" menu systems in the world only serve to unnerve us more, the closer they approach our perception of sentience. Yet, if my proverbial hair's not on fire, I pretty much dread reaching the "human voice" these days, because I have to don my mental armor to ward off the sales scripts that the so-called Customer Service staff is forced to read. As in, "I just called to tell you that my charges would be coming from Outer Slobbovia from Date X to Date Y. No, I don't want baggage insurance. And I already have life/disability insurance, thank you. Yes, I remembered to buy traveler's checks. " That flavor of nonsense.
Rant aside, fending off some poor grunt clocking in at an off-shored job at the Yertle-the-Turtle bottom of the Ponzi scheme known as [cough] "finance" [cough] is hardly a textbook definition of "interaction." To Twitter's credit, by the time the third incarnation of the porn-bot had attached itself to my account, they'd already flagged it as such because of similar content. So it's nice to know that their defenses against sleazy parasites are evolving, too. Kudos to them for not being blindsided by their own viral success.
Because, bottom line, I spend at least eight hours a day interacting with a computer. If I have to do anymore than that, it should be for the benefit of me and mine alone. Not some shotgun-marketing slob who can't be bothered to learn anything about me before pretending to be my "friend."
