There's a fine line between 'social media' and 'anti-social media.'

For a course I'm teaching over the winter intersession at Eastern Connecticut State University, I reactivated my Twitter account, which I had set up in 2011 but had never used to any extent.

As I explored the site, I discovered that I was 'following' more than 1,500 people, only two of which I had actually chosen to follow -- both of whom are friends and former colleagues in the newspaper world of ink-stained wretches such as I. Of the people I was 'following' more than 1,400 were posting in Portuguese from Brazil.

The closest I've ever come to Brazil was attending a Frank Sinatra concert in Chicago back in the late 1960s, and Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66, so I have no idea how I came to 'follow' all of those people. There's an algorithm out there somewhere that went wild.

To look on the bright side, I spent a lot of Twitter practice 'unfollowing' all of them, so when I get tweets from students and former colleagues, they won't be lost in translation.