Essay on Society and Twitter

Submitted By tbay
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Pages: 4
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As many websites arise in our culture, the need to have one increases along with it. Starting back with Myspace and personalized webpages, people have created their own version of a popularity contest. If your link was mentioned on someone’s web page, pretty cool. If you were in someone’s top friends on Myspace, well congratulations, you were in the big leagues. Then, It moves to Facebook. The amount of friends you have can just as easily dictate how popular you are. Only having a handful of people one actually talks to equals a loser. Whereas, having hundreds of friends that you do not know makes you look desireable, making you more popular. The need to show off that popularity only increased when the Twitter phenomenon hit. Now, there are “followers.” These people go out of their way to read all of the tweets you put out. This creates a world of constant popularity contests, unhealthy ego boosts, and eventually, isolation. Taking a look at my own Twitter, I have about one hundred and eighty followers. That is one hundred and eighty people looking to read about what I have to say in one hundred and forty two characters or less. But here is the catch, many of them are aspiring bands, comedians, or personalities. These people have created a tactic to make their popularity rise. A band follows me, I follow back, and then as soon as they get my follow, they unfollow me. So, now they are gaining followers on their profile but it looks like all of these people follow them because they actually like whoever is running that page. In one day they could start with five hundred followers, follow five hundred more people, end the day with one thousand followers and still be following maybe one hundred of them. Then, as a person comes across this page where the ratio of following to followers is one to ten, they are going to think that they are a great band, so they follow too. Now, this band is gaining a “popular” status because they have so many fans, most of whom probably never even listened to a single song they have ever recorded. As people gain these followers, they gain a false sense of superiority. It is definitely not uncommon to hear people say that they are better than one of their friends because they have more followers on Twitter. Going back to 2009, Ashton Kutcher and the Twitter belonging to CNN had a Twitter war. Kutcher wanted to be the first ever profile to reach one million followers, but CNN had the same idea. It became a contest very quickly. In the end, Kutcher hit one million followers before CNN and crowned himself “King of Twitter.” Kutcher was not graceful about his win either; he had a webcast going for the entire night before he hit one million. As soon as he realized he had won, he and some friends popped some champagne and celebrated. Kutcher tweeted about how the people running the CNN page were being sore losers and that they should “bow to the king.” Though his title is a bit old now, seeing as he is now up to fifteen million followers, but other pages like the boy band One Direction, are up to sixteen million. So, clearly millions of followers does not a king make. This internet following that people create reminds me of the stock market. Start at the bottom, rise to the top, sit comfortably and bask in the glory, and then at a moment’s notice,
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