What’s in a name? As the Bard once said.
Well, quite a lot really, and the way we name and describe ourselves online can be a soul searching exercise. What to say? What not to say? How to condense it into 160 characters and so on.
I’m talking about writing a bio on Twitter.
Like with most things, the internet is not short of a plethora of sites peddling advice on the subject: Advice that is typically not suited for your circumstances, because it falls under the pseudo celebrity sphere, is just too asinine or downright inappropriate. Twitter bio generators and the like all tap into the lazy internet culture of finding a quick response to a question that really deserves more consideration and nuance than a simple Google search can provide.
Seriously, don’t bother with them – unless you are happy with phrases like ‘social media ninja’ or with witty references to coffee, then go right ahead…

(A social media ninja – yes, another one. Image available on Pixabay under a Creative Commons licence).

Don’t get me wrong – I like ninjas and social media (I like coffee too) and if you follow my blog and are reading this I’m guessing you probably like them as well – along with lego, making lego ninjas a win-win (hence the photo choice above).
And that friends is the issue – Twitter bios that fall back on these types of memes risk subjugating us all into an amorphous blob of nothingness that no longer transmits any kind of message.
So what’s the answer? If you’re like me, you’ve probably spent too much time thinking about this too and are suffering from paralysis by analysis… I don’t pretend to have the answers and I’m certainly not going to tell you what you should write on your Twitter bio, but I will tell you what I ended up doing.
I ended up writing something that was personal to me. It’s not particularly witty (nor have I tried to be) or earth-shattering in any way, but if you have met me you will say (I hope) “Yes, that sums Scott up in 160 characters.”