I have heard a lot of horror stories from Twitter. Apparently it's crazy on there: it's like the peanut gallery of the internet and the character limit must help to keep things sharp. People buy and sell followers, mores change in seconds, public figures are subjected to ridicule and blistering trolling, politics are dished out, sometimes people get fired for tweets. It is the people's battlefield of the 21st century, and everything is at stake.
Names and reputations, professional identities, personal legacies are all made and destroyed there - I am just now reading that some #breakdowns have actually happened. One wonders if the ever-looming specter of cyber-bullying has haunted Twitter, and to what terrible effect. I'm sure that people become #twitteraddicts just like people claimed to be addicted to Facebook because they were simply being dumb or extremely lazy.
With all this doom and gloom it is easy to get pessimistic about a world including Twitter, but there is also a brighter side to the social media darling. For instance, the guy who invented the #twitterjoke hashtag is now a few hundred thousand dollars richer. Of course he is richer due mostly to his well-paying upper-middle class tech job, but the good karma from his innovative Tweeting must have helped him feel better, thus upping his potential in the workplace, and ultimately his net worth as well (as well has his 'net-worth', too, eh? #twitterjoke).
There was once a street urchin from Calcutta who began to tweet one day, as the story goes, and found himself on television the next, getting interviewed by such industry giants as: Vice journalists, various mainstream media, and finally Oprah herself. This urchin is set to publish a book this November about the Twitter-launched journey, and immigration papers for the U.S. are pending. Talk about #heartwarming, right? But also #bootstraps.
Meanwhile in the United States, Seattle urban residents banded together to 'crowdsource' a recycling initiative that saved a local bookstore, reinvigorated a local park, as well as funded the gym of a new public housing complex. Talk about 'retweet' am I getting to you here? Does this not impress you? Serious things are happening.
I remember one story from the heyday of Twitter, when it was truly still the wild west, in which a band of libertarians managed to close a soup kitchen and shame its operators into leaving town. Truly, for activism of the slackiest kind, there is no better PR wing than a Twitter account and an opinionated but well-spoken Comm. graduate.
In another story, the guy who started Shit My Dad Says (which is very #2009, I know) became a minor sensation and also managed to capitalize quite well on his inherent ability to quote people for humorous sayings. I don't know much about him because I was TUNED OUT in 2009/2010 but apparently he became something like a 'W'-list celebrity. He got a book deal out of Twitter (and he's not the only one!), they made a TV show out of it (you can bet he got something out of that, too), and apparently he will soon release a highly-anticipated 'solo-project' (which, don't worry, will include his dad). Twitter has done more for comedy than the next three internet 2.0 social media outlets combined, and that's a #fact.
The best part is none of these people got anything by Tweeting angrily or negatively about anything. They never went 'on the attack', never sold out, never complained, they never shilled for anything or anyone, it was just pure Twitter savvy that got them anything. They kept their noses clean and didn't start tweeting about politics or anything, they didn't ever chase scandals or sensationalism – all they ever did was try to help society, or try to be funny so that society was a bit less terrible... there's hope for all of us who see Twitter as an occasionally funny pile of shit.
No comments:
Post a Comment