The social media website Twitter is like being at a cocktail party where you don’t actually know anyone, but you’ve heard of them. You stand against the wall with your drink, or you walk slowly around and listen to fragments of their conversations. You’re always coming in at the middle of a story, and you can’t stay for the end because they may look at you rudely for eavesdropping, so you keep moving. Very few people speak directly to you, but when one does, you feel very happy, as if you connected, even for a moment.Some of the people at this party do know each other, and their conversations are lively and fun. You enjoy just listening in.
And in the end, you feel like you had a good time. You were with people who ordinarily wouldn’t include you in their reindeer games. You heard interesting things. You picked up some tips about how to live a fabulous life, how to be more like them, what you have to do to have a career like they do. Maybe next time you’re at the party, more people will speak directly to you. It's like being with the King of Comedy without having to physically kidnap him.
After awhile, as you spend more time at this party where people drop in and out, you begin to notice there are people hovering near you. They think you are interesting, but they don’t know you to speak directly to you, so they’re just hanging out nearby, listening to you talk to yourself, listening to you pretend you are the center of attention and everyone is hanging on your words. You are flattered.
It’s not that peculiar a social networking model. It’s the traditional after work mixer, only ported to a virtual world and the mixer goes on night and day. The ways to get popular in the Twitterworld are the same ones as in the real world. You can be funny. Someone who is fast and culturally current with the quips gets followed by many. You can be the wagon train leader, out in front of the Internet exploration, sending back appropriate links to interesting pages and articles.
You can be a news service, either an actual news service like a blogging TV reporter or CNN, or a limited area reporter (which is probably the future of journalism). I follow people who write about the weather, several who tweet about what’s happening in their neighborhoods (crimes, accidents, fires, traffic jams, lost pets), and others who seem to be home unemployed all day breaking the news of what’s on TV.
Then there’s the people I call the cool crowd, the same group you yearned to be part of in high school. They all know each other, so you follow everyone in the crowd and you know what they’re up to, where they’re going for dinner, what’s the latest popular bar, who’s doing what this weekend.
Then there’s the salesmen and scam artists, trying to figure out how to play the room to their advantage. There’s a Twitter philosophy that says you should follow everyone who follows you, but this clutters your feed with their sales pitches. I see no point in following people I don’t know from other towns either. Where they’re going to dinner in Palm Beach or Irvine doesn’t add anything to my daily experience like a rave about a local restaurant could.
Yes, there’s fake celebrities on Twitter, but there’s also several genuine ones – actors, comedians, musicians, tech columnists – who have eliminated the Catholic Church model of communication. You don’t have to go through a priest to communicate with God. These celebrities have eliminated the entertainment reporter and the magazine editors who filter their stories back to the fans. They talk directly to their fans, but in a nice, safe way, which preserves their privacy and guarantees they’re never misquoted or misrepresented by someone with an agenda.
Newspapers should be afraid, be very afraid. I would hazard a guess many bloggers are frustrated reporters who couldn’t get hired by the almighty paper or had other careers to pursue but still wanted to write. Even if no one is reading them, they are self-fulfilling their desire to communicate. Several have amassed faithful readerships any newspaper columnist would envy. Twitter flings open the communications portal even more – to those who don’t even have the verbal wherewithal to blog, who haven’t got the skill and talent to put together an informative, tight, well-thought out 1,000-word Style Back Page. They don’t have much to say, but they have this to say, and dammit, they’re going to say it, and what do you know, a couple of hundred or more people will read it.
It’s the Mini-Me Newspaper, all about just me and what I think is interesting. Subscribers come onboard, whether you’re a celebrity, the life-of-the-party, the wagon train leader, the scummy salesman, the lonely girl, the frustrated reporter…doesn’t matter. You are the center of your universe and a galaxy of Tweeters will revolve around you in an exchange of news, ideas, jokes, secrets, sighs and lies. It’s your party within a party in an ever-expanding chain of parties where the conversation never stops except for the occasional sighting of a whale being carried by birds through an azure sky.
