All The Twitty Girls
Every guy who attended high school remembers the popular girls.
Their slow-motion walk down the hallway made the nerds cower in prepubescent fear and the jocks sweaty with anticipation.
Good looks and flawless fashion sense raised their status to rock star levels while we toiled away on the periphery, forever yearning to be in their good graces. A simple nod of acknowledgment was all we asked, but in the back of our minds we knew that we never stood a chance.
From that unattainable goal comes a deep-seated resentment that their outward appearance and popularity will take them places in life we can only dream of going.
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This article in Vanity Fair is exactly why people hate Twitter.
Everybody is encouraged to interact, but there is a clearly defined "in" crowd that becomes evident the more you participate.
No matter if you follow unofficial Twitter etiquette to a T, you start to see the same people's tweets retweeted and replied to, which gives the impression that most users just want to draw attention to themselves from, to borrow a phrase from the article, the "twilebrities."
Compound that idea with the fact that the woman portrayed in the article are young and good-looking, and you start to wonder, "What's the point?"
The attractive people are still winning.
It's high school all over again.
Nothing has changed.
Brad – Great points to the article. Just reading the intro made my skin crawl thinking about high school again (I was always terrified of the populars)…and then when I saw the connect, wow.
You are dead on with this one and is just one more reason I think the followee/follower numbers should be made private. Let twitter use them so they can stop spammers, but keep it private from the public eyes. Numbers never make friends.
Luckily, there are groups of people on twitter who do use it for good, understand the value and are treating it like business, not High School. Too bad Vanity Fair doesn’t get it.
You make a good point about the number of followers. That didn’t factor into the popularity idea; it was more along the lines of ‘Great, here we go again.’
But if, like you suggest, we eliminate the the number of followers, we can (hopefully) eliminate the popularity contest aspect of Twitter.
Let’s face it: that’s why these women were chosen for the article.
This made me smile. I think you’re spot on. Even outside the cool-o-sphere it’s pretty hard to get noticed by some of the A-list B2B tweeters. If that isn’t an oxymoron.
I think my biggest gripe is that some of these guys get something retweeted a zillion times just because they are, well, big on twitter.
Jon -
Yep. And the reason they are being retweeted is not because their followers find the content valuable, but because their followers want to name drop.
It’s kind of like if I happened to run into a celebrity talking on their cell phone and I heard their phone conversation, then bragged to my friends that I heard the conversation. I’m only informative by association.