I started compiling some data today after a few weeks of stalking celebrities on Twitter. I’ve been on Twitter for almost 5 weeks now, so I’m clearly an expert.
As I wrote in an earlier blog posting, there’s a little bit (or a lot) of celebrity narcissism going on with Twitter. The whole concept is that you get your friends and family to join and you can send Tweets to one another. But you also have the ability to search for other people. You can search for, find, and follow anyone, theoretically. In a climate like this you can imagine that celebs would be buried with “follows”. While the rest of us are, well, not exactly buried. I’m down to 12 now. I lost one yesterday somehow. When you follow someone you see all of their “tweets”. You can even respond to them. In the friends and family model, you would post your tweet and Gramma, sister, cousin will all read and respond. You’ll read their responses and their tweets as well. Pretty egalitarian and balanced. Now imagine you are an A list actor. You have nearly a half million (not exaggerating at all here) follows. It’s considered “Twitequette” to follow your follows. Obviously they can’t follow all, any more than they could personally respond to all their fan mail. This gives them, as you can easily imagine a pretty huge voice in the “Twittesphere” (These naming conventions are already getting a little cloying.) So while it is pretty impressive that one person can have such an enormous voice, you can see that it’s also obviously a popularity poll. And it can easily lead to some narcissism. I started a spreadsheet to try to track some of these enormous inequalities in follower numbers, but then hit on the idea of comparing them to their following habits. Seems like there should be at least some relationship between the two, right? I mean, if I have a half million followers I should at least follow more people than somebody who has less than a hundred followers, right? Not so much. So I built in a simple division formula (number of followers divided by number of follows) to track this sort of response factor for celebrities of different stripes and levels of notoriety. To whit:
In graph form:
This produced some interesting results. Sure, the numbers are going to be heavily weighted against the celeb who has zillions of followers, but as you can see, this varies some from celeb to celeb. Paula Poundstone, bless her heart (as they say here) in Texas, is the champ at returning her fan’s follows by following them. She had at the time of this writing 8,600 followers, and was following an amazing 8,200. She deserves a Twitter award with some catchy name like “Twitresponder”. In the extreme opposite, John Mayer is the champ in the greatest number of unreturned follows category.
I don’t know what sweeping generalization I can come to about this. I mean, it’s no fault to John Mayer than he can’t respond by following each of the hundreds of thousands of people who follow him. The lad can’t help it. I think what bothers me a little is that I’ve read the tweets of some of these celebrities who talk about how “connected” Twitter makes them feel, and how they love being in a conversation with their fans. Well, as far as I can tell, Ms. Poundstone is about the only one who can claim that distinction.
It is the nature of celebrity that it be a one-to-many relationship with people. That’s kind of a given in the life of any famous person. The Internet has always been a leveling factor in our culture. Anybody can host a website with a home page that looks just as entreating and wonderful as Microsoft. It is somewhat iconoclastic just by its nature. And I think that’s what bugs me a little. That Twitter, designed for two way conversations should be, at the highest level, quite the opposite. I think the first time it really struck me was when I saw one celebrity in my follows tweeting to another celebrity. At that point I felt like removing my follow to both of them, and I had to do some digging to figure out why it bugged me. Did your high school have a “commons” or cafeteria that acted like kind of a social gathering place when you didn’t have classes? Well, if you’ve ever seen the movie “Mean Girls” you’ll know what mine was like. Certain cliquey tables only allowed certain people to sit at them. There was a sort of hierarchy of how this worked, radiating outwards in rows of tables to the hinterlands by the tray return which was so loud and smelly you could barely stand to sit there. But those top couple of tables talked to one another. If you happened to walk by for the most part they wouldn’t even lift their gaze to acknowledge your presence. As something of an athlete in high school, I was a member of one of these inner circle tables, so I know what it feels like from that perspective, as well as the perspective of the hinterland tables. This Twitter phenomenon has something of that feel to it.
While Ashton Kutcher is currently engaged with CNN in who can get to a million followers first, perhaps we all ought to sit back and reconsider where this new juggernaut of the Internet is going. Quite frankly, except for the following of celebrities, I have no use for it. My loyal throng of followers tweet about once a day, if that. At the high end, there are folks who are tweeting every few minutes. This is supposed to be a social networking app, but I think it’s fast becoming anything but that. Until everybody gets on here, including the people who you know and care about what they’re doing as well as those who care about what you’re doing, it’s more like a two-tiered system. If you built an upside down pyramid based on this ratio, you could easily scoop off an entire sector of celebrity tweeting. If, as I have also noted, they tend to respond to each other’s tweets to one another, there is even more of a sort of apartheid at work. Would this work? Would it benefit anyone? Of course not. I’m guessing at human nature here, but I sincerely suspect that some of these celebs wouldn’t even be involved in Twitter if it weren’t for their fan base of thousands. Not only that, but I’m guessing a whole lot of the hundreds of thousands of us who follow them wouldn’t much be interested in Twitter, either, if we were not able to follow them.
So what’s this all mean? Probably the only safe conclusion you can draw from this is that Twitter is almost certainly not playing out as it was intended to. Last night, in a competition with CNN, Ashton Kutcher reached over a million followers. If I changed his numbers today, I’m sure he’d surpass John Mayer on my charts. Is this social networking at all? It’s becoming less about networking and more about broadcasting in my view.
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