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May 9, 2013

Twidiocracy

This was an interesting article: http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/twidiocracy_719178.html# 

 It touches on the seeming importance of Twitter (only 16% of Internet users are on it), how much the 140 character format constrains communication, how it encourages narcissism, and how "followers" can be purchased for artificial popularity. The point about encouraging narcissism particularly struck me. Here's the writer's description of Twitter: 

 "A technology that incentivizes its status-conscious, attention-starved users to yearn for ever more followers and retweets..." 

I think any social media can encourage narcissism by letting you at least think you're reaching and influencing lots of people. We've even modernized and systematized narcissism by quantifying your popularity. You can easily track your followers, friends, likes, and retweets and check your popularity against others. 

 For myself, it's made me think about how I use social media. I'm not less sinful because I don't tweet (except to feed blog posts there) - I can be just as narcissistic through an paper newsletter. However, it seems that Twitter is a technology that should be used cautiously at risk of encouraging love for yourself.

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