You're Awesome!

I’ve been told that I’m awesome more often since joining Twitter ten months ago than throughout out all of my prior life and almost exclusively by people who have never met me, don’t know me and who seem to think that because I can click the follow button I’m - well - simply amazing!

I don’t let it go to my head because I've also been called a 'capitalist lickspittle', a 'right-wing neo-fascist' and a 'left-wing socialist jerk-off'. I also have lots of people in my real life who know me quite well and who regularly assure me that I am merely just ok.

Then too, there is something about trusting the sincerity of an automated direct message telling you that you're awesome that tends to get in the way of believing it.

I’ve often commented on the extreme rhetoric used in social media and usually my comments focus on the accusatory and over-the-top attacks on someone else’s point of view or opinion. But not all of the extreme language in places like Twitter is reserved for attacking others. Sometimes it’s just so downright obsequious it’s embarrassing. 

The fact that someone chooses to follow someone on Twitter doesn’t make them awesome. It doesn’t even make them special. It might mean they’re curious, interested in the other person’s tweets or just simply hoping that the person they’re following will follow them back but it doesn’t raise them up to a level of awesome achievement.

In the real world, we tend to reserve that for people who discover cures for diseases like polio or who invent new technologies nobody ever thought of before. Steven Hawking is awesome, the last person who chose to follow you on Twitter isn’t.

I follow lots of people. Sometimes I follow them because they were recommended by Twitter, sometimes because they followed me and after checking their profile and reading some of their previous tweets, I thought they might be interesting enough to follow. Sometimes, I unfollow them later because it turns out we have nothing in common. Occasionally, Twitter randomly unfollows a few on its own.

And that, of course, is the other side of being awesome.

People are not merely offended that you unfollowed them; they are downright insulted and even hurt. They send messages demanding to know why you are no longer following them or tweet that you have unfollowed them to the Twitterverse as if anyone else actually cares. It’s as if you have committed a grave injustice to them and they feel the need to tell the world what a mean, selfish and uncaring person you are.

It makes me wonder what this whole follow thing really is about.

Clearly for many, it isn’t about connecting with people and exploring ideas or just chatting. It seems to be like acquiring points and the more you have, the more value you have as a person. Some seem to think that the number of followers they have is a measure of their popularity but that seems pretty shallow to me.

I follow a guy who has less than 50 followers and communicate regularly with him. Our connection started when he severely criticized one of my blog posts which prompted a back and forth argument for about a week. I learned some things in that debate that I didn’t know before and started following him on Twitter and he started following me. We communicate reasonably regularly now and have established a solid mutual respect for each other.

I contrast that with some who have a few thousand followers, who never interact with anyone or who waste my timeline with meaningless quotes by famous dead people. I haven’t got much time for that so I tend to unfollow those people (the tweep, not the famous dead person) after awhile. Likewise, I’m not overly interested in following those constantly trying to flog their latest book or sell iPhones so I tend to unfollow them as well. It’s not personal nor do I think those people are bad people; it’s just not where my interest lays.

But a lot of folks online take it very personally. 

They protect their follower’s list like a lioness protects her cubs and they can switch from thinking you’re awesome to telling the world you aren’t in a heartbeat. One Twit, (or is it Tweep?) that I followed based on Twittter's recommendation, tweeted me that he didn't permit fascists to follow him and immediately blocked me. It was if people he permitted to follow him should feel honoured. It really doesn't get much more adolescent than that.

But here’s the thing. I thought it was my follow list. I thought it was up to me to decide who I wanted to follow and when I make a decision to follow someone, it isn’t like I’m bestowing some great honour on anyone. Likewise, when I decide to stop following someone, I'm not intending it as a personal slight,

I’ve had a number of people actually tweet me to tell me they’re honoured that I am following them. Why? I’m just reading their tweets; I’m not leading them to the Promised Land.

The most interesting thing I’ve noticed in all of this is that those who were most honoured that I followed them and who took the time to thank me and tell me that I’m awesome, almost never contact me again unless I unfollow them. Many of them were so honoured they used a bot to send me a direct message to tell me so. But they have no connection to me, make no attempt to get to know me and forget I even exist until another app they use tells them I am not following them anymore.

It’s like accumulating a lot of stuff over a period of time, never using most of it but becoming upset because you suddenly become aware of the fact that something you never used and forgot you had has gone missing. It’s a shock and your life is somehow diminished.

I have a message for people like that. Get a life!

It’s Twitter, not a new universe. People will follow you and unfollow you randomly and for countless reasons. It means nothing. It is not an honour to have someone follow you, it is merely an opportunity to potentially get to know someone online. It is not an insult when you are unfollowed, it simply means that the person with whom you had no contact has moved on. 

If a person’s life is so bereft of meaning that they measure it by who followed or unfollowed them on Twitter, I suggest they need to spend less time online and more time out in the real world building a real life. 

A person’s value as a person is not measured by how many people do or don’t follow them. It’s measured by things like character, talent, ability, intelligence and compassion for others. We are what we think and do in life. We are not defined by how many follow or stop following us online. A followers list is merely what its name implies, a list of people who are following their tweets. It is not a measure of a person's worth.

It’s nothing more and nothing less than that and treating it like it is somehow the measure of a life is like trying to evaluate a life based on how many ‘things’ you’ve acquired. At the end of the day, that’s how most people treat their followers. They’re just things that make the list bigger.

There is no humanity in that, just an insecure need to appear to be popular. It's an illusion of popularity brought about by the delusion that the number of followers one has is a reflection of how popular they must be. People offer to sell followers and others set up "follow back teams" in an attempt to gain more followers.

That isn't popularity. It's just one more illusion in the great cloud, a universe where virtual reality for too many has become more important than the reality we live out here in the big world.


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