I'm not a big fan of Twitter. I was vaguely intrigued by the idea at first, and I am sure that there do exist a great many trenchant and pithy pronouncements, all neatly forged within the restriction of 140 characters. But it soon became clear to me that the idea had been hijacked by a bandwagon of users with very little to say, users for whom 140 characters is more than enough to express their petty and infantile views and thoughts.
I was nevertheless a little taken aback recently when Blaise Campaoré, the long-time president of Burkina Faso, chose to broadcast his resignation in a Twitter post (as reported in the Wall Street Journal and other sources).
One would have thought that such a significant statement might have merited something a little more formal than a tweet, where it must have found itself in company with such pearls of wisdom as "My #cat has been sick again" and "What was #Rihanna thinking this time?".
Call me old-fashioned, but the platform seems completely inappropriate for such a proclamation, and if nothing else shows a certain disrespect for his citizens.
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