Is Twitter Serious?

David Carr on the implied seriousness of Tweets.  He makes some interesting points about the difficulty of considering a communications channel very informal, but then paying the price when it upsets someone.  I remember a similar discovery in the relatively early days of e-mail.  When we started to use that emergent  channel internally it was praised for being informal, easy to use for transmitting creative thoughts without any fear.  Soon afterwards though we discovered that all searchable and discoverable communications are serious to some.   It is important to know how serious your channel is when you speak 'creatively', because we adjust both our speaking and listening according to context.