DAILY BLOG #8: Failure to Communicate
I’ve held off for two days on writing this specific post. It’s a little hard for me to face, but f*ck, I must.
I just had my 9 year Twitter anniversary.
NINE.
It was 3287 days ago, an hour prior to driving down to Comic Con, that I signed up for this new fangled micro blogging service. I had a scifi webseries to promote and a network of fellow geeks to build… and Felicia Day made it look sooo easy! Well 27800 tweets later… and I have 68 followers north of 9000. That’s… pretty pathetic. I said it. Don’t judge. Not to devalue any person who has chosen to follow my feed (BECAUSE I LOVE EVERY ONE OF YOU) but let’s be honest: I’m an actress who’s been on TV a bunch of times, tweets out cool science and scifi stuff, can be charming, a little badass and I even like hockey. When I signed with my new manager last year she looked quizzically at my number, “and you’ve been on Twitter for how long?” (can you please just get about 10K?)
27800 (approx) tweets. That’s a lot of sharing. On average, 8.5 tweets a day. To a number that has no correlation with ‘influencer’. According to any brand or casting director considering ‘my reach’, I’ve failed.
But. Of course, I haven’t.
I wouldn’t be the person I am today if it weren’t for Twitter. I had never felt a part of a community before this strange bird. My college experience felt fractured, straddling the worlds of musical theater geeks, the sorority mainstream and an off-campus boyfriend. I never felt like I belonged. And even in Hollywood, as an agent’s assistant, then a struggling actress, I never fully felt connected with a tribe. But Twitter awoke with the birth of the digital creative community, the webseries creators, and I found my people. And these ambitious, creative, intelligent people led me to new set of brilliant people, who then opened my mind to new worlds of science and philosophy, self help and joy. I felt like I was at a post TED Talk cocktail party every day without the hangover.
The people I have met, the ideas I have been exposed to, the joy I have found in the simple construction of 140 characters is quite simply mind blowing. I still tweet everyday (unless I am on one of those digital detoxes… high recommended!) because the way that I think and express myself is now intrinsically tied to a community. No man is an island.
So screw the naysayers. I may not have 1 million followers, I may not even have 10 thousand (though that would be really nice so please tell your friends about me), but I am part of a community, maybe even your community.
So, thank you.
