“I have decreasing amounts of tolerance for unnecessary communication because it is a burden and a cost,” said Baratunde Thurston, co-founder of Cultivated Wit, a comedic creative company. “It’s almost too easy to not think before we express ourselves because expression is so cheap, yet it often costs the receiver more.”Mr. Thurston said he encountered another kind of irksome communication when a friend asked, by text message, about his schedule for the South by Southwest festival. “I don’t even know how to respond to that,” he said. “The answer would be so long. There’s no way I’m going to type out my schedule in a text.”
He said people often asked him on social media where to buy his book, rather than simply Googling the question. You’re already on a computer, he exclaimed. “You’re on the thing that has the answer to the thing you want to know!”
Etiquette Redefined in the Digital Age - NYTimes.com. I think about this kind of thing a lot, and oscillate between getting annoyed with other people for asking so many questions and with myself for being so grumpy. I get a lot of questions on Twitter about my plans or my thoughts or my opinions that I just don’t answer, because I fear that that way madness lies. For one thing, if it becomes clear that I’m the kind of person who answers trivial questions from strangers, questions that arise simply from some mild curiosity, then I could spend the rest of my life doing that — especially since answering one question often (very often) leads to others. But then I think, “Come on, it’s just a question, go ahead and answer it, be nice.”
Another thing that drives me nuts: when people ask for me to explain the context of a tweet that could be perfectly explicable if they just read one tweet back in their timeline. But maybe I’m over-reacting to that too.
The one thing I’m certain about is: I think about all this too darn much.