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The Catholic Sun is on Twitter.

One of my favorite professors in grad school was Franciscan Father Kenan Osborne. I can’t decide if I liked him because of what he said or because of how he said it. But he would take his time to answer questions during every lecture. He would treat each student like he or she was the center of the universe until the question was answered. It wasn’t answered until it was understood. And, considering the theologians weren’t easy to understand, that could take a while. (I probably won’t get to use this word again this year, but Fr. Osborne recognized each person’s haecceitas, or “thisness” — as it’s usually translated from the Latin. It’s my favorite concept from Duns Scotus, a medieval Franciscan philosopher I studied with the Franciscan friar. Scotus focuses on the particulars (individuals), you could say, where St. Thomas Aquinas focuses more on nature, which we all share. This is oversimplifying, but this blog post will eventually be about Twitter, so I have to get on with it.)

Anyway, at one point Fr. Osborne tells us to take a business card-sized paper and, on one side, write down all the people we think really love us. On the other side we write down the people we think we really love. “If you have more that five people on either side of the card, you’re kidding yourself.” The point he was making — I think, anyway — is that we can only have truly loving relationships with a handful of people. If we think we love, oh, 20 people or so, we’re spreading ourselves too thin. We live in communities and share of ourselves, but we can only truly be friends with a few people. Those few can come to know us completely, and we can come to know them. (You can love someone better, and they can love you, if you actually know each other.) And we can love each other and support each other to find strength to serve. These close relationships help us better serve the People of God.

Anyway, all that brings me to Twitter (naturally). I haven’t been really using Twitter much these days. I suppose I should clarify. I do use Twitter everyday. As soon as I post a story on www.catholicsun.org, I post it on Twitter (@thecatholicsun) to let everyone know about it. And I check out some of my faves on a regular basis, @CatholicNewsSvc chief among them.

But on my personal Twitter account, @dominicanjedi,  I hadn’t tweeted since Aug. 5. Before that, June 23. I wasn’t tapping into this monster networking service. You can learn a lot about a lot on Twitter. But I wasn’t learning anything. I’d go to my Twitter page and I’d have posts from people I didn’t even know. I was following nearly 500 people, and nearly 500 were following me. “Studying for my comps” read one tweet, “Going dancing tonight” read another. Who was studying and who was dancing? Beats me. @Iamnotinterested maybe.

So then I thought about Fr. Osborne’s little lesson, and I decided to stop following a ton of people. That might be Twitter sacrilege, I don’t know. There’s this, seemingly, very nice Golden Rule thing that happens on Twitter: If you follow someone else’s tweets, he might “do onto you” and follow you right back. But then you wind up following 3,000 of your “closest friends” and, well, you might practically stop using Twitter all together like I did.

So yesterday I narrowed down the list of people I follow. I tried to only follow people I know, Catholic newspapers and news outlets or journalists and other stuff that I’m really, really interested in (like for social media stuff, most folks follow @mashable).  I could only narrow it down to 140-something — there’s a lot of Catholic newspapers, you know.

Sure enough, some people have stopped following me. Good for them, I say. Simplify. Don’t just follow me so that I’ll follow you back. Do you really care what 500, 1,000, 2,000 people have to say? You might, but you just can’t process that much. I think I’ve got too much with 150. But I’m paying more attention because I’m following fewer people. And, if you tweet, you might think about doing the same. I’ve been getting a lot more out of Twitter because I’m trying to focus on a lot less.

*Just a note, final thought, or whatever: I think I could have done the same thing by using “lists.” I could have narrowed down the tweets I pay attention to and not had to “unfollow” anyone. That’d be cool and everything, but I just think this whole “follow reciprocity” is bogus. The people I most respect on Twitter tend to follow fewer people. It must be vanity or exhibitionism or something worse when you’re main focus on Twitter is to rack up followers. You should use Twitter because you care what others have to say, not to call attention to yourself. And if you really care what others have to say, well… it’s easier to pay attention to 20 than 200 than 2,000. That’s just common sense.