On Assuming Social Mediocrity
Having chosen to tweet, am I now a twit or a twaitor?
Up until recently, this here Medium and (yawn) that there Linked In were the only social media I deigned to participate in other than MeWe, but my community there kind of petered out. Anyway, there are only so many online conversations I can stuff into my head on a given day. If I did not keep myself from following them I would never get anything useful done. I was on Facebook at the end of the Oughts and learned what an insidiously annoying distraction it was. I felt nothing but gratitude when it kicked me out for not using my “authentic name,” an admission that my fake profile wasn’t marketable.
And ever since it first launched I’ve disdained Twitter. Tumbler for the inarticulate and easily distracted was my opinion. A diabolical time sink that eats brains and regurgitates so many indigestible bits of them. Tweets from twits. And so, I eschewed Twitter and even avoided following links there, because you can’t eat just one. But slowly, I came to appreciate that tweets at their best are mini-stories or at least entertaining aphorisms, and can even be informative. (There’s even a book of poems cobbled together from Donald Trump’s tweets and assorted pronouncements.) At least that’s how I justified signing up for Twitter the other day.
But why my sudden change of mind from denial to embrace? My conversion was occasioned by a visit to a friend, one of those physicians who likes to write. She’s published three books, none of which were widely read until recently. I came to see her to give her a copy of my just-released novel, the first draft of which she had kindly volunteered to edit. With hearty congratulations she thanked me and said she would tweet about it.
When I asked her if she thought that would help sell it, she said almost assuredly and told me a story. In her eight or nine years of tweeting, she has manged to issue 22,000 of them and follow 5,000 twits, 3000 of whom follow her. Her Twitter stats ramped up, she said, after she let loose barrages of anti-Trump sentiments, some hers but mostly retweets. This led certain of his supporters to slam her, elevating her Twitter profile. Coincidentally with her flame war, sales of her book on Diabetes started rising, and last year she made just oodles in royalties she never expected. When I asked if there might be other reasons for her rising fortunes, she couldn’t think of any.
Even knowing that correlation does not imply causation, I was impressed. So now I tweet to burnish my brand. It’s come to that, I’m afraid. Will a Facebook page for my imprint be next? Given my history with it, I can’t see that happening. As corrosive and divisive as Twitter can be, Facebook is downright evil. But I need to do more to market my book before its newness fades and especially leading up to the holidaze, and so shamelessly I grabbed a handle to self-promote.
So, if you’re a twit of a kind, let’s hook up and trade tweets on controversial topics that, without being nasty, might stimulate controversy if not outrage. And if you’ve written a book or released an album or something, we can serve as PR engines for one another. I’m Mr @PerfidyPress. Happy to make your acquaintance. Tell what’s on your mind that’s bugging you. You supply the theory and I’ll supply the conspiracy. Together we will be strong.
But know that we’ll be watched even if nobody responds or retweets us. Social scientists, market analysts, retail strategists, and intelligence agencies have software that plugs into Twitter’s streaming data fire hose to filter everything that happens there, filtering tweets for content of interest and submitting them to algorithms that make certain decisions. Companies like Export Tweet put that analytic power online for anyone to partake of, usually at a fancy price for shipping and handling. Know that austere banks of servers lovingly fondle our utterances 24/7 to profile and fit us into one grand scheme or another. Should we care?
I suppose we should, if not for our reputations and privacy then for the good of humanity, which powerful institutions manipulate for inhumane and mercenary ends. But believing as I do that (a) the government already knows all it needs to about me, and (b) I’m pretty immune to marketing pitches, I make an exception for myself for my own mercenary ends. On second thought, then, don’t follow me; I’m just another corrupting influence.
