Aug 09
26
Why Are All These Twitterers Following Me?
It seems like pretty much every day there in my inbox is a new message, sometimes more than one, telling me that someone is following me on Twitter….
I wouldn't mind except that I don't know the people who are following me.
Which makes me wonder…
First, I don't tweet because I actually have more important things to do. Haven't done for months and probably have only posted half a dozen tweets since registering well over a year ago.
Second, I don't know the people who are following me.
So who are they and what do they want from me?
Is there some new Twitter based variation on the Nigerian email scam that tells you that some long lost relation ran a gold mine in Nigeria and hid the money and if you just send your address and bank account details they will transfer all the money into your account minus a 20% handling fee? Or is this some scam based in the old USSR to get you to meet some Russian girls?
To be honest I don't actually care if I never find out. But when I see what appears to me to be a precursor to spam, I start to wonder about the statistics that I see and hear about the influence of Twitter.
There were a lot of questions asked about the role of various “authorities” in the recent Iranian election and how tweets dominated the distribution of information. How much of new communication technology is actually driven by machines running at proxies for various governmental entities? Call me paranoid, but I am starting to think that between governmental involvement, corporate involvement, criminal involvement… all these new fabulous technologies that we are being told are going to change our live are really not that important at all – other than to get us to register, give up our personal information, and then to keep our attention on the pretty toys while the people who run things (mainly those mentioned above) get on with redistributing all controls over information to themselves.
This, to me is something we should be paying attention to.
The redistribution of control over information. Think about it. If you control the filters you essentially control the way that people think. And over the last ten years, particularly during the period that Bush was in the White House, a lot of bald faced lies were told to the populace of the free world to get them into a particular mood so that we would support a number of courses of action that were proposed.
This continues.
To run any significant global strategy takes a lot of organizational time. Time to do the research, gather intelligence, determine the propriety of the strategy, get people on board, develop supply chains, etc etc. To do any of the things that are being put in place today that is of significance has almost certainly taken years of planning.
To get that planning right the people have to be kept informed to a level that makes them feel informed but not upset. That means that we get a very select set of data (if at all).
I just wonder how much the various organizations noted above have hijacked Twitter…
So please – don't follow me. I don't have anything to tweet!