You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
Twitter.
I don’t really understand it.
It’s powerful. It’s interconnective. It’s globally recognized as a social media leviathan.
But why only 140 characters?
Who decided that was a good number? Why not 160? 250? Why not 25?
Is this the medium of a generation that thinks in hiccups. Is Twitter the cyber version of a meandering burp?
When I Tweet I often have to abbreviate, truncate and use disjointed grammar from a third world country to cram all my thoughts onto the tiny easel of communication.
Twitter is wildly wonderful and offers me interconnective immediacy.
But Twitter also forces me to write terribly disjointed thoughts in 140 characters. I sprinkle in hash tags and pretend I don’t have Tourette’s syndrome, and that my friends is Twitter.
But what is it? How does it work?
I am not sure I will ever truly understand it.
I know I have a handle: https://twitter.com/WhineyBones
Handle? Why handle? “What’s your twitter handle?”
I don’t know, it’s just there when I click on it.
Handle. What an interesting concept.
The dictionary defines handle as: a part that is designed especially to be grasped by the hand.
Exactly. Isn’t that the thing I hold on my coffee cup so that I don’t burn my hand?
Handle? Isn’t that something we used in the 70’s when CB was the interstate social media of relevance.
“Breaker one-nine, this is rubber ducky. I gotcha back door. What’s your handle, big buddy?”
But in this new millennium salt shaker of anything goes, Twitter handles are all the rage.
I think Twitter is like that old shampoo commercial.
You tell a friend. And they tell their friends. And they all tell their friends.
Suddenly its rub a dub dub, the world’s in a hot tub of interconnectivity.
Bam.
You are Kevin Bacon, 6 degrees of separation across the planet.
I wasn’t sold on Twitter.
I joined and then I put the social media app in the proverbial internet closet.
For about 6 months.
I looked at it in the darkness, next to the moth balls and the dusty Monopoly game and it was stuck on 20 followers.
Stupid Twitter, I use to think.
It’s not growing.
I expected, like a weed, that it would simply grow by itself. I was a babe in the virtual woods, and I thought my Whiney Bones Twitter handle like some kind of magic mushroom on a Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds bus tour would grow and grow and grow.
Someone said you need more followers.
More followers?
Why? Who cares I said from my imagination laboratory.
“Because,” they said.
And there you have it.
You need more Twitter followers because.
So 6 months later, I opened the closet and I looked at my virtual pet rock.
“What are we going to do with you?” I said aloud.
I need to put you in the light. I need to sprinkle some water on you. You must grow.
And so it began.
I moved my lap top to the couch in the living room where I Tweet with the blinds open.
I have followed people. I have learned to Hash Tag with trending subjects. I have learned to think in 140 characters at a time.
I have grown my dead and dark mushroom into a blossoming rutabega. From 20 followers hiding in the fungus, I now have 300 plus followers, not all of whom are trying to sell me something.
So I am going to continue to nurture my new toy.
Like any living, thriving organism. You must spend time with it. You must make sure it is fed and happy.
occasionally even Twitter wants to be scratched behind the ear.
I will continue to monitor the Twittersphere and grow my legion of doom.
But ultimately, whether I have 300 followers, or 300,000 followers, I will always wonder; why?
How does it work?
And maybe more importantly; who cares.
“You need more followers!”
Yeah whatever!
While I stare at my followers and say “hey look at all the followers I have. Ultimately, not one of them has ever sent me a check.
Wouldn’t that be nice. The more followers you have, the more checks you get in your mailbox.
I would love a check that says in the memo line: Great Tweet on December 13th 2013. Here is $1.50
Now that would be a results driven mechanism.
But until then, Twitter is a fun hobby when I’m not deleting spam and emails from the AARP.
Life’s Crazy™