Sunday, January 09, 2011

Twitter rant

Part of an email I wrote to Charles (slightly edited):

A lot of people follow others on Twitter without bothering to read the followee's account profile. Followers will just as quickly un-follow someone if they don't get followed in return. So if Big-boobed Betty starts following my tweets, and I don't show any interest in following hers after a week or so, Betty will take her big boobs elsewhere.

The desire for "mutual following" probably stems from a deeper, darker urge: the urge to pump one's "follower" stats up as high as possible. It's exactly the same dynamic that fuels activity on Facebook: a large number of friends or followers translates into ego-validation. One girl who started following me had just joined Twitter; in the course of a week, she leapfrogged my 20-some followers and had hundreds-- all thanks to mutual following. I admit I'm tempted to follow some of the lovelier specimens who occasionally attach themselves to my account, but when I visit their accounts, I normally see that they have nothing to say: they waste their 140 characters on links to special-interest news articles. It's rather sad.

I've tried to make my Twitter experience as entertaining as possible by attempting, alternately, to (1) see what sorts of poetry are possible; (2) see how much information I can cram into 140 characters; (3) see how much I can imply or evoke in 140 characters; (4) use the "reply" function to start bizarre, solipsistic dialogues with myself; (5) write parodic movie summaries; (6) see what happens when I write in different languages; and (7) slip in bits of wisdom learned from others. I'm obviously in the minority; most people on Twitter seem to think that "social networking" means "be a link whore; engage in mutual following." And that's it.


_

3 comments:

  1. If someone follows me, I normally look at who they are following and if I recognize who else they are following or their tweets look interesting, I normally follow them back. This does lead to me unfollow a number of people for a variety of different reasons. The use of auto-direct messages means a quick unfollow. I also weed out those that link to pay to read articles or those that are clearly only trying to market a product. I have been thinking about unfollowing a number of people whose tweets I normally don't even read.I follow a large number of people and wonder if I am missing tweets that I would like to read.


    P.S Even though I used it three times above, I still don't feel that comfortable using "unfollow" as a word.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I like how you explain this phenomenon of Twitter and how you challenge people to be creative indirectly. Having never tried it out myself, do you mind if I use part of this post in a discussion on social networking with my students?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Jason,

    I feel your pain. I still have trouble using the word "login" as an adjective (e.g., "your login ID"), and I refuse to use it as a verb. Instead, I prefer the old phrasal verb "log in"-- two separate words, as God intended. Another construction I balk at is "underway" as opposed to "under way." But I think history is against me: both "login" and "underway" are extremely common these days.

    Holden,

    It would be an honor! My experience with Korean students-- and this info is now a few years out of date, so things may have changed-- is that they love social networking because they like the idea of connections acquired through chains of familiarity. In keeping with "frog in a well"/Hermit Kingdom mentality, they don't like strangers. Or more precisely: if a stranger were to appear, he'd need to be a friend of a friend.

    So when I asked my students, in one course, to create blogs, they were leery: blogs can be accessed by anyone on the Net, a fact that made many of my students nervous.


    Kevin

    ReplyDelete

READ THIS BEFORE COMMENTING!

All comments are subject to approval before they are published, so they will not appear immediately. Comments should be civil, relevant, and substantive. Anonymous comments are not allowed and will be unceremoniously deleted. For more on my comments policy, please see this entry on my other blog.

AND A NEW RULE (per this post): comments critical of Trump's lying must include criticism of Biden's lying on a one-for-one basis! Failure to be balanced means your comment will not be published.