What makes me laugh is the sheer number of compulsive tweeters calling their incessant technology link broadcasts social media. While it is true that tweeting resource URLs does provide useful value, when it becomes a full time job one has to wonder whether the Tweeter actually has any other purpose in life. Although there is some room for social interaction between Tweeters, such interaction seems only to provide a momentary distraction from the incessant compulsive obsessive disorder of endlessly mining data from the web and throwing it up onto Twitter’s live feed in hopes of doing only the Gods know what – growing an ever bigger following? Is that what makes Twitter “social”?
Is gaining ever more followers – that oh so important currency of worth on Twitter – that “is all and end all” public display of rank and validation of self – the new meaning of life?
David Meerman Scott has written about the new rules of social media and about how to create a viral “world wide rave” – whether it be by focusing on one particular industry area in which a business owner or individual is involved, by making a particularly fascinating video about a product, providing multiple weekly news releases on a site, listing endless resources, doing endless research – or some other such thing in such a way that causes a stir in that particular community – all in the hope that it will attract enough people to build business to the point where it all pays off.
The tread mill of work moves at an ever faster pace, and the number of hours on the treadmill increase daily in competition with each other as Tweeters try to provide the longest running most successful show on Twitter – digging into and speculating on the great importance of even the most minute and mundane areas of virtually anything that hasn’t been explored in deep enough philosophic or scientific detail on Twitter, their blogs or elsewhere on the Web.
Posts about the important benefit of using an animated gif in place of a favicon or how we can find sites similar to our own on the Web cram the public timeline waiting for a click to bring traffic to sites about – favicons and similar sites. As if those things were somehow of monumental importance in and of themselves. What insanity.
The internet is like a huge and ever growing junk-heap. So called “useful content” is dressed up and presented as free, but on closer inspection it’s often just more over-hype and re-hashing of ideas already beaten to death before by way too many others – more people merely speculating on the value of each idea in hopes of doing it more genuinely and more socially than anyone else.
There are those who in their sickness to out post and out Tweet the top tweeters and top posters band together into little criminally insane enclaves – and in their insanity team up and work together and in shifts to build ever more momentum… the Twitter and Blog world Mafia is known to exist, but just like the Cosa Nostra of old – they will swear that it doesn’t exist, and, just like the old Mafia, will kill anyone who says it does.
“Follow me, follow me…” is the fanatical subconscious chant – building and building the endless number of followers needed to sustain self validation – which is, after all, the only real currency of value on the web. “My RSS feeds get read by more people than anyone else’s, my eBooks get downloaded more than the next guy’s, my WhitePaper has been signed up for a record number of times, my YouTube video has been viewed…” and on and on and on ad-nauseum. The occasional “slip” of hinted benefits gained from Twittering and Blogging “hundreds of thousands of dollars in deals” and “I’ve gained so much that I can’t even say” without a shred of proof – who ARE these sick people???
What mental malady, or maladies (for surely there must be more than one to make such a complex mess of a person), do these people suffer from? Can it be cured or is this just a new way for mental cases to serve their whackadoodle psychosis to the rest of the unsuspecting and not ready world?
Twitter should come with a warning label, the strongest one there is. It should say:
WARNING: These people on Twitter are NUTS. View their tweets with great caution or you too will be sucked up into the delusion that what they are saying is actually of some importance. CAUTION: There are some scientists who claim the world wide recession is the direct fault of Twitter and bloggers in general due to an ever increasing number of people spinning their intellectual wheels on providing speculative theory analysis rather than actually producing any work.
I for one refuse to fall for any of their bullshit. Yes, bullshit – almost all of it – but I will continue to watch all of those I’m most suspicious of on Twitter quite closely, and read their incessant blog spew in the off chance that I too can learn to make hundreds of thousands of dollars and deals so big I can’t even tell you… gain more RSS feed signups than anyone else, have my ebooks downloaded in record numbers and generally get so big that even the Twitter Mafia can’t ignore me any more and votes me in as their Cappo di Tutto Cappi. All I have to do now is figure out how to make them an offer they can’t refuse.
