Dr. Strangetwitter…

My social network
Image by luc legay via Flickr

…or how I learned to stop worrying and love Twitter!

Twitter is an odd thing.

Fresh new ‘in’ thing, marketing mega aid, social communication tool. Chance for conversations. Measurement of popularity. Celebrity fad du jour. Breaking news source. Avenue of connection and communication in real time.

Target for spammers, and every damned marketing guru and get rich quick schemer around. Trap for young players. Place for the banality of human nature to play out. Competitive arena of social scale. Overwhelming influx of advertising, tedious droning, self important attention seeking, and all the worst aspects of the ‘look at me’ culture.

So, why do I enjoy it so much?

Well, I LIKE social media, social networking, the whole enchilada, so to speak. I have been on the web for over a decade, and I have seen it all, from IRC text based chatroom style, through the email craze, IM gains, and now microblogging the  minutae of our lives.

I do not necessarily feel the need to detail every aspect of my life, though my tea obsession may be well known by now, but I do enjoy passing on things of interest, same as I generally do on my blog, and this includes the odd and arcane act of Retweeting.

Retweeting involves much the same as forwarding of emails – you find a tweet (post) by a Twitterer that you like, and you forward or RT(retweet) it to your network. In email terms, that is annoying and a terrible habit – to forward everything of interest to all your friends. On Twitter, it is considered jolly good form, and renders you likely to be followed by many eager new friends.

And therein lies the rub, gentle reader. Your new followers are not often interested in you. Generally, they are interested in the benefits of a frequent retweeting acquaintaince. Perhaps you RT an area of interest, but there are more often those who hope you will RT their meanderings also. Generally, they tend to be the marketing gurus, lifestyle coach, something to sell types.

Now I find myself in a dichotomy of the numbers game. At first, I gleefully reciprocally followed all my new ‘fans’, excited so many people were interested in my meanderings online. Now, those numbers mock me with their hollow achievement. Any geek knows the seductive nature of popularity – once, we were the weird ones in our high school, tender, vulnerable years. Now, we are shiny, sunny, POPULAR at last!

Yet that shimmering vision before us, is, alas, a delusion of the numbers that greet us on our Twitter home page. A mirage of popularity indeed! So my cynical side whispers to me, remove those followers! Why follow those so obviously looking to leverage of your good intentions? My chirpier side contends I do not have to RT their blandishments and advertisments, and I can remove those that bother me with too frequent and obvious sales pitches.

What to do, gentle reader? What to do, indeed?

Well, nothing. Nada. Zip. I am continuing the experiment, and seeing where it takes me. Judging not the reasons or motivations of those who make up mere numbers, I return to my original take on it all.

Doesn’t matter. Really, it doesn’t. The number is just that, a few lines on a page, easily manipulated. Instead, what matters is the people who actively engage in conversations with me, or post intruiging, interesting things I can share.

Twitter is like any other social media tool, full of traps, ego issues, personality conflicts, and huge gains to be made with intelligent and considered approaches. And pearls of wisdom amongst the dross:)

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