a photo of me speaking with danah boyd at the tlt symposium held at the penn stater conference center and hotel at penn state on saturday, april 18, 2009. photo by colecamplese.

The title of this post made it sound as though I’m all worked up about Ashton vs. CNN, and Oprah joining twitter, but in all honesty – I just don’t care.

I don’t care if Ashton Kutcher or CNN get to a million followers first, although CNN thought that was newsworthy enough to send a “Breaking News” email about it at a little after 2AM this morning.

The big news today is that Oprah has joined twitter and from what I’m observing, it seems to have people all “a-twitter” (no pun intended. Ok well – sort of intended). People are saying having Oprah on twitter will ‘ruin’ it, but I’ve gotta say that I just don’t get that. That’s like saying Oprah’s television show ruins TV.

In my mind, the only way Oprah could “ruin” twitter is to encourage so many people to join twitter that it brings down the entire network. That would make me slightly cranky and I’d resent that a bit, but other than that … who cares?  Twitter is your own PERSONAL network. You choose who you listen to, so if you don’t like Oprah – don’t listen. It’s a simple choice really.

I’ve also seen some posts talking about Oprah ruining twitter because now everyone will use it instead of just the “cool kids”. Again I say – so what? Aren’t most of us all about working hard to build community and aren’t a lot of us frustrated that people never seem to get what we’re saying? If it takes Oprah to encourage someone to join twitter, and through that they start to understand the power of these connections then I say “THANK YOU OPRAH”. If we want to build community, then that should be an inclusive community – not a community of people we think are worthy of using the same social network we do.  A good community would be one that would welcome others, encourage others and be thankful that more people are learning about these tools and new ways to communicate.

So instead of complaining that everyone will now use twitter, let’s think of ways to include the new people and introduce them to the ways twitter can benefit them. Remember, you only see what you choose to see – on twitter, and everywhere else.