Twitter is a different animal. Just like hows blogs and social networks are also distinctly different from each other, twitter the micro-blogging tool is way way different. The one thing that’s common among them is i-scratch-you and you-scratch-me back[ISY-YSM].
I have been witnessing of such blog politics at close quarters and I generally hate it as it spoils the joy of blogging and how it gets you into a sort-of unwanted race. Now this isn’t a blogpost to prove my worthiness.
Keeping the poltics of the blogosphere aside, the growth of social networks is putting people into a different stress. The one that makes you accumulate friends, colleagues and followers. You accumulate as many friends as possible at Orkut, As many colleagues at Linked In and as many “followers” at Twitter.
I infrequently update my twitter page with a silly message or two on what I watch and what I’m doing. There’s nothing more to it. I follow some friends through the twitter feed from Google Reader and there are a bunch of friends who do the same thing.
From time and again, I get notes from twitter that someone unknown to me is following me on twitter. But today was a revelation. And that scares me sometimes. Either I’m a super blogger that people aren’t just satisfied with my blogposts that they also want to follow my footsteps at Twitter. Or it is the ISY-YSM syndrome. Of course, I don’t follow those I don’t know or those who aren’t even known to me through their blogs.
Today was a revelation. I received a note from Twitter that Jason Calacanis is now following my updates on Twitter. Since Jason is a blog celebrity, I have known him through his weblog for a long time now. Jason Calacanis the owner of Weblogs Inc and Mahalo is now one of my “followers”. Yay !! or Whew !! depending on how you take it. Jason doesn’t know me but he wants to follow me on Twitter. For what ? To discover this, I drifted off to Jason’s Twitter page and I see that he has 17000+ followers and he is following 15000+ people. I don’t get it. Jason’s a nice guy and I have nothing against Jason but how does one follow 17K+ people twitters and have 15K people following them ? Scoble has even more followers and he follows more people that anyone else. I find it tough to follow just 10 people. For me that’s information overload.
This is the kind of party politics(as we call it in Tamil Nadu) that is spreading like a disease in social networks and I’m also a proud contributer to it. The ISY-YSM is also pretty evident in small networks that is anything indie. From independent personal blogs to independent writers, film makers, musicians this is very common. The very notion that independent movement is largely independent isn’t exactly true.
Movies made by studios are ripped apart by movie critics and reviewers from all over. Whereas indie-films are watched a handful crowd who are themselves budding indie film makers and they also know the film-maker in person. This makes the indie movie reviews very superfluous. Something like Madan reviewing Tamil Cinema in Vijay TV.
Madan is a integral part of who’s who of Tamil Cinema. And his reviews are also very mellow, infact they are pretty in-accurate at times, owing to the fact that he already knows the film-maker as a friend or a peer. Wouldn’t it be embarrassing to tear apart their films in a prime-time program, even if they deserve it to be that way.
If I were to make a movie as an independent film-maker, I would largely depend on blogs to get the news out but I would certainly expect a honest review of it. A good movie will eventually be noticed and a bad movie dropped even after getting enough brownie points from fellow bloggers. Wouldn’t it be embarrassing when you make a dull-headed movie and bloggers, your so-called “followers” applaud it.
Huh !! the days of our lives !!
kirukkal.com 