Mitch Goldstein ran the Angry Paul Rand account on the Twitters. Now, the real Paul Rand (q.v.) would yell at students and suffered no fools; maybe that was his intrinsic personality. But Goldstein found the intrinsic nature of the Twitters altered his.
So why did I close the account? Simple – it became something bad and negative…. I was also starting to get more and more negative comments about what I was saying. I think critique is great. Critique is the cornerstone of improvement for a designer. But you cannot critique in 140-character anonymous tweets on the Internet. That is not critique; it is just negative, pissy soundbites.
What was slowly dawning on me is that Angry Paul Rand was equally guilty of this, too. My snarky aphorisms where just as bad as people telling me how unlike Paul Rand I was, or how full of shit my tweets were, or how elitist and ridiculous I was sounding. I was doing the same thing, but with a lot more followers. Then on September 13th I tweeted “Being a designer is not just a job, it’s a calling.” This is something I truly believe, but I received a tremendous amount of negative commentary from that tweet. I took it personally, and insulted a couple of people right back. To those individuals I am tremendously sorry – it was uncalled for and really not the kind of person I am.
You don’t have to be Andrew Keen to recognize that each medium has his own biases and changes the way you communicate. If you still somehow doubt this, let me ask you something: Have you really never yelled into a cellphone, or never seen anyone do that?