2014 wishes

摘要

At the beginning of December, one of the stories in the media was that the attorney general was to publish guidance on Twitter to help prevent people from tweeting about legal cases and committing a contempt of court. Putting comments on Twitter is a lot different to writing this column. Twitter is designed for short, sharp comments, which means that when they are in response to a trigger event they need to be tweeted as soon as possible after the trigger to be relevant. As a result, tweets can be a gut or emotional response to such an event: time is not given to the composition of the content, nor thought given to how people may react to the tweet. In the past, such emotional responses would be disseminated amongst a small group of friends, who would understand the emotion, the context and the reason, and that would be the end of it. A tweet literally goes out to anyone and everyone and can quickly land the tweeter in hot water.