I studied Greek in college, which meant I was temping soon after. My best gig was in an internal medicine office, where I sat in a closet calling insurance companies all day, and the ladies teased me for being a virgin, and also thought I was quaintly cute. Two of them attended my wedding.
In the closet, while calling the insurance companies, I stared at an old DOS medical records system. Each screen was a different human, a person, reduced to an ASCII medical records profile along familiar axes: name, age, gender, race, and then medical history. By the end of my stint I had an image of a reconstituted person, a human, appear (to my conscious mind) instantly upon switching screens. This was late 1999, the age of The Matrix, and I identified with Mouse, the geeky young character who scans the falling green characters and cognizes the world itself. Martha Schwartz, old lady, 309 lbs., sitting on her couch with a walker in front of her, tube TV tuned to QVC. Jerry Lamota, 45 years old, union worker, collecting disability, his teenage son is second string on the football team, his daughter has a C- average.
I'm reminded of this as I use Twitter more. I'm finding myself moving with increasing facility from the few pixels I'm granted on Twitter to a classification scheme. My inadvertent model centers roughly on order of magnitude of number of followers, with a twist for number following.
| Class | Followers | Following | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| I | 0 | 1-99 | Spammer or squatter. |
| II | 1-99 | 1-199 | Joined Twitter, doesn't use it much. |
| III | 100-999 | 200-999 | Normal Person. Mortal. Me. |
| IV | 1,000-9,999 | 1,000-9,999 | Gamers, I have to believe. The key to this class is that the number following is roughly equivalent to the number followed. I suspect there's some particular program behind this. My guess is that it follows people on the expectation that a significant percentage will reflexively follow back, and then the software eventually drops the non follow-backs. "Thousands of followers, GUARANTEED!!!!" I have a friend who does this manually (on Instagram), so I'm sure it's been automated. |
| V | 1,000-9,999 | 200-1,999 | Mildly prestigious person. |
| VI | 10,000-99,999 | I rarely see following > ~10% of followers for this class or above, unlike with the gamers in Class IV. | |
| VII | 100,000-999,999 | ||
| VIII | 1,000,000-9,999,999 | ||
| IX | 10,000,000-99,999,999 | Is there anyone with more than a hundred million followers? Gaga is at ~30M as I write. |
I feel both a sense of camaraderie and a mild sense of competition with people in the same Twitter class as I am, Class III. The people in Class V are my target. It feels like they're doing me a favor when they retweet me and interact with me. It feels good. The feeling I project on them is the feeling of getting the inside scoop. I imagine that it's good to have talked to someone in Class III when that person graduates to Class V themselves. I have interacted briefly with people in Class VI, but it feels like I'm wasting their time. Class VII and up are Olympian to me.
Note that Class IV introduces a "gamer gap" between the "legitimate" classes III and V, further emphasizing the divide. If these gamers can get thousands of followers, why can't I? Class IV is an ersatz Class V. Technically, you have thousands of followers, yes. But everyone knows you're a fake.
A good friend of mine has become a Class VI musician. The hallmarks of his reputation are vulnerability and self-deprecation, and this seems at first and even second blush to be authentic. His albums are lengthy meditations on divorce, his parents' and his own. My wife and I happened to be especially close with he and his first wife at the time of their divorce, and it was a life-altering mess. From my perspective, the vulnerability he projects is, in fact, very tightly controlled. The story of their divorce has become a trademark for him; no-one else is allowed to tell a different side. He actually threatened to sue me for commenting about it online. That was very early on, and we've since reconciled--personally, but not online.
I think it might actually be one of the great questions of our age, how to navigate the rise of the personal brand. Busting up the old broadcast media machine and giving everyone a voice has turned us each into our own marketing department. Now we're all complicit in spin and, to an extent, personal fascism. Before the Internet people certainly postured, but posturing is different than spin. Posturing is something people do, spin is something marketers do. Before the Internet there were personal brands, too, if you were famous enough. For example, Stalin was famous enough:
“But I’m a Stalin too,” Vasily protested. “No, you’re not,” Stalin replied. “You’re not Stalin and I’m not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and the portraits, not you, no not even me!”
Now we're all famous enough. I'm not whit537. whit537 is what he is on Twitter and Facebook. This can be stifling. It's not relaxing for my musician friend to curate his brand so closely. From the Stalin quote you get the sense that he feels downright out of control, like he's created, well, a monster.
I'm wondering how we can jam these very human tendencies. On the one hand, the classism of Twitter puts me in mind of the "behind-the-sceners" issue with Gittip. How do we downplay popularity contests on the Internet? It's so natural and easy for me to think about the money I can get on Gittip, but I need to think more about what I can give, or at least, what I can build when graciously given the freedom to do so. In the same way, it's natural for me to think about what numbers I can rack up on Twitter, but I need to think about promoting others, and about what we can build together. Fundamentally its about personal character formation, but we can design software to encourage the values and habits we want to cultivate.
I dream of a social network where the focus is on the work being produced together, rather than personal brands per se. ESR talks about letting one's work be one's statement, and I like that. We do that pretty well in free software. Can we spread that elsewhere? As William Carlos Williams would have it: "Compose. (No ideas / but in things) Invent!" Of course, I'm composing ideas right now. Maybe we need anonymous blogs, like how The Economist has no bylines. It's the content that matters, no?
On the other hand, I think the answer for me is to just be willing to culture jam myself sometimes. Having a personal brand kind of feels like having a raging boner in public. It's just a huge, throbbing distraction that I don't even really want to talk about. Whenever I notice my personal brand getting out of control--can we just call it my ego?--it's easy enough to throw a wrench in the works. The formula is to find something taboo with respect to my ego, and also true, and then to say it. That's what I'm trying to do here, with the Twitter Class system. And when other people do that for me, by calling me out on something, I hope I thank them.
Great post Chad ;)