I don’t follow you on Twitter.

Nothing personal. I don’t follow anyone on Twitter. Not Ashton Kutcher, Glenn Beck or Shaquille O’Neal. I choose not to keep up with the Kardashians at all, much less on Twitter.

It’s not that I’m anti social media. I blog, though not enough. I use Facebook, probably too much. I use LinkedIn. I actually have a Twitter account, though I’ve yet to tweet, much to no one’s disappointment.

I think I understand Twitter, but I really don’t get it. Who needs to know that Ashton just paid $10 for a vodka tonic at the hotel bar (a real tweet) or that someone I once met at a conference just had a strawberry yogurt? Yum.

Of course I know that there are other kinds of tweets, too. Sometimes tweeters report real news in real time. Articulate people express cogent thoughts in remarkably few syllables. Generous folks share information and insights from conference sessions seconds after the words are spoken. Discerning people recommend articles, books, movies and such that would undoubtedly interest me and enrich my life.

As valuable as these things might be, I don’t have time for them. I already have a TMI (too much information) problem. I cannot begin to absorb, process, understand and use all the information that I choose to receive already via television, e-mail, the Internet, podcasts, books, newspapers, magazines, radio and other sources. It’s all more than my 20th Century brain can handle sometimes and that frustrates me.

I once read about a CEO who was so overwhelmed by the volume of e-mails he received that he occasionally declared “e-mail bankruptcy” by erasing everything in his In Box, with the full confidence that the senders would follow-up on anything that was really important.

I could never do that. But I do erase a lot of subscription and newsletter-style e-mails – some valuable I’m sure – without ever reading them. Magazines I intend to read stack up and sometimes wind up in the recycle bin unopened when I declare “magazine bankruptcy.” I record programs that never get watched and download podcasts that never get heard. I live and work among piles of books I fully intend to read.

So, for now at least, I choose to not subject myself to 140-character messages from friends and colleagues, movie stars and politicians, opinion leaders and industry experts. They would only remind me of all the things I’m missing. Including the vodka tonics and frozen yogurts. Yum.