Right now, the "web…blah…log" is not being updated regularly, but feel free to peruse the archive, and check out our carefully selected highlights from Season One, Season Two, and Season Three.

Sunday, January 8, 2012

secret

So here we are.
I have a secret to share with you devoted dozens:
I’m on Twitter. Sort of.
Hang on there, cowboys... I’m on Twitter, but I’m not me. I decided that in order to truly just dip a toe in the social networking waters, I should fly under the radar, so I have a completely made up name. Don’t bother looking. You won’t find it. It’s a name that is unrelated to anything or anyone you may have ever associated with me, my career, or this blog.
And it’s not necessary to look for me anyway, since I have not sent out a single tweet yet, and probably won’t, ever. I’m purely a follower. I can’t even think of what I would possibly want to wink-wink. 
You read that right: wink-wink.

That’s really what all of the tweets I’ve seen so far appear to be: wink-winks. With the exception of news headlines and food truck locations, they’re all one-liners, one-uppers, gotchas, ha-has, clever bitchings, ass-smoochings, aren’t-I-wittys, cries for attention, desperate fame-graspings, over-sharings, wannabe stand-up-esque observations, and self-deprecations that are somehow also self-adulating, all covered with a thick layer of I-know-what-I’m-doing-and-am-better-than-you. And because of that thick layer, my freshly-coined collective term for all of this bite-sized smartassery is wink-winks
And don’t get me started on the hashtags:
#HashtagLongerThanTweet
#BettingNoOneElseThoughtOfThisOhSoCleverHashtag
#PunchlineLoveMePlease
See, I prefer my smartassery served up in as many words as is bloggingly possible. As such, I remain a silent follower of others’ tweets and wink-winks, me with an anonymous egg for a face, just like the millions of other subdued egg-faces on Twitter.
And yet I had a follower within five minutes of signing up.
I now have five followers. For a hot second I had eight, plus several others who’ve come and gone one by one because I didn’t follow them back. I know exactly none of these people.
Comparison: I have fourteen official followers (not counting email subscribers, for which I have no real number) on this seventeen month-old web...blah...log, a blog that I have poured countless hours of my soul into. I have five followers on a two week-old, practically stagnant Twitter account with no discernible personality, a one-line bio, and a made-up name.
And you wonder why I shake my fist and tell Facebook to get off my lawn.
Of course, as I see my followers unfollow me, I still find myself thinking, hey... why are you leaving me, other than the fact that I clearly have a made up name and haven’t said anything yet and also you’re probably just a spammer who wants me to follow you and click on your toxic links?
And then I think, maybe if I tried to wink-wink just once...
And then I slap myself, NO! Don’t do this! You’ll fall into the pit of needing to be followed and constantly trying way too hard to be witty, and the hashtags, those scars of Satan, will never stop! Never! You’ll find yourself watching bad TV just so you can choke the feeds with your lame observations, like: Watching #WorkIt premiere on #ABC, even the #CannedLaughTrack isn’t buying #HideousExecutionOfOldHatPremise. #HowIMissScolari&Hanx #LuvMePls
And then I need a nap. No wink-winks my own for now... just the endless wink-winks of everyone else, which is more than enough.  
Damn you, Web 2.0. Between birds that tweet and birds that are angrily flung at pigs, I am even further trapped in your suckage of time. 
Yes indeed. Welcome to me.

4 comments:

  1. Just want to gently point out that on Facebook, you have control over who sees your wink-winks, because they're not your followers, they're your friends. Also, I (very rarely) wink as @JulieVanK. :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. 1) If you don’t like the random/spambot followers, you can make your account private, which means no one can follow you without your permission

    2) Blog-length smartassery can be delightful, but in my experience it doesn’t scale well.

    3) If someone’s twoots annoy you, click the unfollow button. It’s Twitter’s greatest feature.

    4) I prefer to follow people who care what they do with those 140 characters (i.e. wink-winkers) than people who type mindless asides on their sandwiches or their house clutter or episodes of American Idol. @badbanana, @aedison, @scottsimpson, @biorhythmist to name four.

    5) I *do* know what I’m doing and I *am* better than you. We have been over this.

    Wink-winking since 2007,
    8^)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Smart-assery on Twitter is definitely an art form. And there are some amateur smart-asses out there who are every bit as entertaining as the professionals.

    When I was a kid, my mom said to me, "Nobody likes a smart-ass, Thomas."

    My answer?

    "I do. I think they're funny."

    ReplyDelete
  4. Stephanie,

    while I'd follow you in a heartbeat on Twitter I can understand not wanting to use it and really it's a perfectly fine tool for just getting news (and those followers sure were spam bots). And as long as you regularly update you blog I'm a perfectly happy person (really, anytime there's a new post here to read it brightens my mood. There's something about your writing style...)

    For me, on Twitter I like following a) creative people I respect, b) some news sources and c) people with similar interests than me. I mostly interact with group "c" and I actually met some interesting people from all over the world that way I probably would have never met in real life.

    So anyway, as was mentioned before, the unfollow function is the greatest tool. People that annoy me are unfollowed quickly. Also #trending #hashtags are 99.99% ignored by me. They're the worst on Twitter.

    So to summarize, don't feel pressured in tweeting anything on your made up account but still there are some nice things about it, just use it as it fits you :)

    cheers
    christian

    ReplyDelete