This hilarious post on the ubiquitous social media experts is a must read for anyone who has a Twitter and Facebook account because everyone else has one but is largely clueless otherwise. They follow and get followed, get stuff written up on their walls - send and receive invites on occasion. Even with all that, they don't get the warm and fuzzy of being with the program. They are pretty sure there is a method to the madness and it is only a matter of time before they figure it out too.
That description by the way, describes my forays into the world of social media almost exactly. The author of the post Micheal Pinto, describes a common malaise of the highly networked individuals - the “social media deafness" :
a state that occurs when a person’s social graph exceeds 500+ virtual friends. The result is that the person is a mile wide, but an inch deep.
I have never got the point of the 500+ friends either. By six degrees of separation some of these 500+ people must know everyone in world that has an Internet connection - that's a whole lot of friends to keep up with. But it gets even better after that. Pinto says, there is a Ponzi scheme where the social media deaf zombies lead each other into.
Like any good Ponzi scheme the lead zombies can make a good living feeding the hopes and aspirations of the worker level drones who parrot their every blog entry.
This line reminds of something J said a few days ago. She had seen me sign into my Twitter account and asked to know what it was. I am pretty sure the image of the bird got her thinking it must be a cool kid-friendly site I had discovered for her to check out. Anyways, I tried to give her the best second grade level definition of micro-blogging and she had this summary by the time I was done.
"So one person types 'I saw a bird on the tree'. Send Tweet. The other person types 'I saw a bird on the tree too'. Send Tweet. They do that all day long. How boring !!" I had to explain to her that adults can sometimes do the silliest things and believe it is cool. I am sure she lost a good deal of respect for me just knowing I Tweet too. So much for making an effort to stay with the times.
Of Twitter zombies and anyone who is at risk of becoming of one, Pinto says :
Like drugs, social media can be a good thing in the right hands. But there are too many people out there who don’t know what they’re doing and just get carried away. Sadly most people just lack the good old fashioned discipline to keep their worse instincts in check.
I figure, I must be at risk because I just blogged about his blog and had nothing useful to add of my own.
That description by the way, describes my forays into the world of social media almost exactly. The author of the post Micheal Pinto, describes a common malaise of the highly networked individuals - the “social media deafness" :
a state that occurs when a person’s social graph exceeds 500+ virtual friends. The result is that the person is a mile wide, but an inch deep.
I have never got the point of the 500+ friends either. By six degrees of separation some of these 500+ people must know everyone in world that has an Internet connection - that's a whole lot of friends to keep up with. But it gets even better after that. Pinto says, there is a Ponzi scheme where the social media deaf zombies lead each other into.
Like any good Ponzi scheme the lead zombies can make a good living feeding the hopes and aspirations of the worker level drones who parrot their every blog entry.
This line reminds of something J said a few days ago. She had seen me sign into my Twitter account and asked to know what it was. I am pretty sure the image of the bird got her thinking it must be a cool kid-friendly site I had discovered for her to check out. Anyways, I tried to give her the best second grade level definition of micro-blogging and she had this summary by the time I was done.
"So one person types 'I saw a bird on the tree'. Send Tweet. The other person types 'I saw a bird on the tree too'. Send Tweet. They do that all day long. How boring !!" I had to explain to her that adults can sometimes do the silliest things and believe it is cool. I am sure she lost a good deal of respect for me just knowing I Tweet too. So much for making an effort to stay with the times.
Of Twitter zombies and anyone who is at risk of becoming of one, Pinto says :
Like drugs, social media can be a good thing in the right hands. But there are too many people out there who don’t know what they’re doing and just get carried away. Sadly most people just lack the good old fashioned discipline to keep their worse instincts in check.
I figure, I must be at risk because I just blogged about his blog and had nothing useful to add of my own.
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Please visit it and help us promote it…
Anon - That cryptic reference to ET and FB lead me to a story on You Tube and Facebook invasion - scary stuff.