Say what you will about Twitter — I certainly have and will again — but the idea of having hundreds or even thousands of “followers” is a little bit intoxicating. Intoxicating like a fine Merlot or intoxicating like crack remains a debating point, but there’s no denying the psychological impact of a large audience, in any endeavour.<\/p>\n
Or at least, the ILLUSION of a large audience.<\/p>\n
Sure, when Ashton or Demi or whatever big stars delight us with their latest non-event — “This lineup is taking forever- I need my latte” I’m sure the response is voluminous, immediate, and just as inane. If you have a million followers, all you need is a response rate of a tenth of a percent, and you got a thousand replies.<\/p>\n
I wonder how many they read…<\/p>\n
When you’re a schmuck like me with just a couple hundred followers or so, the numbers are not so kind at propping up my self-esteem to Hollywood proportions. But there WOULD often be some response. A star here, an RT there, an LOL by DM. (See, I know me some lingo).<\/p>\n
It became the goal to nurture that response, to play to expectations, to give as I got, to embrace the notion of having followers.<\/p>\n
My first post on Twitter, date January 31, 2009, reads:<\/p>\n
[robertgdaniel] is wondering if he really wants “followers”…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It seems I did manage to grow comfortable the concept, at least somewhat. The idea that people might find what you’re saying interesting or provocative enough to actually respond to<\/em>, well, that’s almost as intoxicating as having a real conversation…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Say what you will about Twitter — I certainly have and will again — but the idea of having hundreds or even thousands of “followers” is a little bit intoxicating. Intoxicating like a fine Merlot or intoxicating like crack remains a debating point, but there’s no denying the psychological impact of a large audience, in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rgdaniel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rgdaniel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rgdaniel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rgdaniel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rgdaniel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rgdaniel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rgdaniel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rgdaniel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rgdaniel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}