The northlondonhippy

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.