There are  some people that I have been following on Twitter that I have now started following on Google+ because they are quite interesting and quite a few times they give you some food for thought. Two of these people are Panagiotis and Nikos (both post in English and Greek).  The origin of this post comes from a question that Panagiotis (@vrypan) had about the utility of sharing something with 400 people, why not make it public?

Nikos brought up the point that you could be segmenting people based on (their) language preference, thus while it is a public post in a sense, you are not clogging people's streams with a language that they don't comprehend. Nikos wrote that he considers it a courtesy. My comment to Nikos was that we live in a global world and one of the things that we need to deal with is that we ought to be OK with being in a public place where there are languages spoken (or written) that we don't understand. The web is indeed that public town square (or Agora if you will) where discussions are had.

Nikos pointed me to this post over on Google+ . You can head over there if you want and join the discussion, but I will just quote it here for brevity's sake:

Tip: If you write in more than one language, do take the time to build up language circles. If I visit a profile and it is in languages I do not understand, I will not follow back. Post the per language into a correspondent circle and everybody will be fine. :)

Now, my initial reaction (to the original poster, not Nikos!) was something profane, however profanity doesn't move discussion along, and I think that this is something that needs to be discussed! So now that cooler heads have settled in, here are my thoughts on the subject:

First, why must one follow me back? One thing I like about  Google+ and Twitter is the asymmetric nature of connections. I don't need someone to follow me if I follow them, and if someone wants to follow me I don't need to follow them. The two-way connection implied by Facebook is not a mode that I want to embrace.

Secondly what's with this "everybody will be fine"? Does having a language in your stream that you don't understand hurt you in some way? Or does not following people who post in other languages as well hurt you in some way? (because you did say that you won't follow people who don't adhere to your language comprehension 'rule').

We now live in a time period of unprecedented access and a wealth of information (at least for those who are privileged enough to have access to the net!) While English may be the lingua franca of trade, and more and more of research, it seems to me that  everyone, especially monolinguals Anglophones, ought to realize that the world doesn't revolve around English. Asking people to create language based groups and only post that language to that group as opposed to your general timeline (which I suppose would be in English?) puts the linguistic burden on the non-native-English speaker. It also seems to me like a way of suppressing languages other than English in "public" venues because you are asked to separate your English speaking audience (presumably the public posts go to this one) from your other language audiences.  This also factors in a level of presumption, how do I know that someone doesn't speak language X? Why should I exclude them from the language X circle because I think they don't speak it?

Further more it asks the speaker to take a non-conscious action, determining which language they will speak (or write in this case) and make it a conscious one. Sure, when communicating we think of our recipients (or at least some of us do) and we tailor the message to our audience.  Microblogging however isn't about going out and getting an audience, it's about self-expression and possibly finding people with similar tastes - so if you don't want to follow me because you don't want to read some posts I have in Greek, then please don't follow me. I now have five groups on Google+, Friends, Family, Acquaintances, Academics, Work and Following.  Are you telling me that I ought to multiply that by four, five or six because I happen to want to post in languages other than English every now and again?  I think not ;-)

Now, if you don't want to read posts in languages you don't understand you can do one of two things. Unfollow those people or ask Google to create a filter to only display certain languages. Then again, you can join the global village, and part of that means that you should be comfortable with content you don't understand every now and again.