A few months ago, I signed up to Twitter, not entirely convinced of its difference to Facebook, but I did it because it might be good for me as a writer. I currently have 327 followers and follow 300 people, which isn’t a bad follower/followee ratio for someone who has so far published less than 2 000 tweets.
Initially, I followed my friends and people who genuinely interested me, people who were relevant to my work and welfare, and I vowed never to follow people “just because”. A few months later, I can’t say I’ve stuck to those principles and now find myself in a giant virtual popularity contest. And I’m not alone.
There’s a guy I follow who updates his status every hour save for when he’s asleep. He tweets about anything, any time, and from wherever he is. To my surprise, instead of people feeling invaded by his endless twaddle, he gets more followers each day. So much so that his virtual ubiquity has extended to newspapers and radio shows — they now have him writing columns and giving talks. I’m happy that he’s used the social media to strike gold for his career, but his updates honestly give me a headache. So why don’t I just unfollow him?
I’ve come close a few times but shamefully have been halted by my curiosity and ego. The other day, his prowess directly affected me when, unsolicited, he suggested that people follow me on Twitter.
The result was astounding. My list of followers grew by 17 in less than an hour, a feat that usually takes a few months to achieve, depending on how much you tweet. To my utter mortification, I thanked him as though he was a celebrity endorsing my product.
Strangely, there are plenty of these twelebrities, as they are called, or people who have gained popularly (or infamy) through social-media networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. They are not famous, just popular, and many of them are virtual bullies, because they mostly say things just to be read instead of really engaging with people.
To affirm this, they publicly exchange greetings with their favoured followers and friends (some of whom vicariously gain fame from being included on the list) in what becomes an online playground display of popularity and ego-stroking that’s innately exclusionary.
Sadly, the appeal of these twelebrities is that, at any given moment, they have fingertip access to thousands of people who laugh at and retweet their jokes, thus increasing their omnipresence and online value.
So the question is: Do I unfollow this guy? On the one hand, I find some of these social-media friendships and cliques contrived and pretentious. But, I wonder, do I engage more with this powerful character and his ilk because he “endorsed” me and thus I stand to gain from being included in the popular crowd?
As my mother’s child, I feel I know better than that. Yet as a digital identity in the deep and wide ocean that is the internet, I have to say it feels nice to be retweeted.