Archive for February 22nd, 2009
Having a lot of free time recently has meant I’ve been able to immerse myself in the Twitterverse. Its an odd place to virtually hang out and it reminds me of so many things.
I’ve already compared it to trying to shout the loudest in a room full of shouty people. Competing for attention seems to be impossible, unless you already command attention from people in the real world.
Celebrities seem to thrive the most in the Twitterverse. As they are already celebrated, people are ready to engage with them and hang on their every word.
Many people seems to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to communicate with celebrities, to be noticed by them, receive a reply from them, or better an endorsement of whatever it is they do on the internet. There’s a sort of special personal validation that can only come from making some sort of contact with a celebrity.
Its not a one-way street, as the celebrities also benefit from the attention they receive. The more followers on Twitter you have, the more popular and worthy a celebrity you are and I would expect this sort of thing will be used in future contract negotiations for some of them. I can hear their agents now, saying with absolute authority, that celebrity X has 100,000 plus followers on Twitter which means there’s an instant, loyal audience for anything they do.
Maybe that’s true. But maybe not.
Just because I follow a celebrity on Twitter, does not mean I will see their film, watch their TV show, buy their album or even visit their blog. The ease with which you can follow someone means you may only have a passing interest in what they really do, but you are curious about how they use Twitter.
Some celebrities seem to use Twitter as a way to feed their own ego and narcissism. There’s nothing wrong with that and to be honest, I wouldn’t mind scoring myself a little piece of that kind of Twitter action too. It seems seductive and addictive, to have a constant flow of positive affirmation from strangers who admire you for one reason or another.
But Twitter doesn’t work like that, if my brief and ever-evolving list of followers is anything to go by. As a virtual Twitter nobody, people choose to follow me on the basis of randomly encountering one of my tweets, or fishing for key words contained within them.
I’ve been tweeting a bit about my coffee consumption. Its innocuous enough, true to my life and its how I start most days, with a freshly made cappuccino. Probably 20% of my followers have picked up on my coffee references and that’s why they are there.
I’ve also made a few references to being a journalist in real life, so I have a handful of followers interested in the field of news. I don’t tweet much about that part of my life, so they will end up disappointed.
I also tweet about drugs, specifically my weed intake. I sometimes use bad language and one day I may even make some cock jokes. I know that when I do, I will lose followers.
The more focussed your tweets are on a particular subject, the more loyal your followers will be. Perhaps I should split myself into several virtual people on Twitter; the coffeehippy, to tweet about my java intake, the weedhippy, to tweet about smoking spliffs and lastly, the cockhippy who only makes dick jokes.
I’m just going to keep tweeting whatever I feel like tweeting and if I offend some people, I’ll probably end up enthralling others. Who knows? My net number of followers seems to be slightly ever increasing and I’m not really paying that much attention to the people who leave.
I did promise to tweet my credit card numbers if I ever reach 1000 followers, which is quite an incentive to follow me and put up with my bullshit.
And by bullshit, of course I mean high-quality, informative and entertaining bullshit of 140 characters in length.