You hurt my peewings
Since I’m at school, I have a couple of Technology and Society questions with multiple choice answers. Have a go! Write in your own answers if you wish!
1. If someone follows you on Twitter, ostensibly it’s because they like what you say, right? I mean, if they’re not a spammer or a pron site… that’s different. So you follow them back, not only to be polite but to interact, because they seem OK. Let’s say after a couple of months you realize that 90% of their Tweets (apologies if you hate the twee language… see what I just did there?) is comprised of bad puns and quotes by other people. This is not really why you signed up for Twitter, it was about having a dialogue and sharing interesting thoughts and content, and so you subsequently unfollow them. Immediately, like within an hour, they unfollow you. Does it mean:
a. they never really liked what you said, they just wanted you to follow them.
b. they did like what you said but now they are mortally insulted and so they say good day, sir!
c. dropping them somehow changed the content of what you Tweet.
OK then.
2. If your blog is now more autobiographical than ever and someone who professes to be a good friend of yours (and they are, seriously, under almost any definition) and knows about your blog e-mails you to check in. That person asks several good, friendly questions about your life, all of whose answers are in the last two weeks of your posts. Should you:
a. point out that they should read your blog.
b. write out all the same answers that you just posted in your blog.
c. feel hurt.
d. a and c
e. b and c
f. realize that no one is obligated to read your blog, Becca, you always said that.
I thought so. ~sigh~
Title comes from Maureen’s adorable daughter. I wish there was a song with that title but there isn’t. Yet.
Boston – More Than A Feeling
I’m new to Twitter, so that one’s got me stumped (wow – within an hour he/she stopped following you, huh?).
The other thing happens to me a lot, though.
I just copy and paste things that I wrote on my blog into email. When they ask why I refer to my kids with code names, I tell them to just go read my effing blog if they want to know what’s going on. 😉
I have the opposite problem, though. I start to tell a friend about something that happened, and they’re like, “Yeah, you told me that already.” When I hadn’t, they’d just read my blog.
question #1, I choose “d”.
d. One-sided following is frustrating, because you want to respond to what you see but you know they’ll never see it. Why bother.
Which is why I pretty much only follow breaking news sites and people who have no other friends so therefore ramble to themselves (i.e. John Mayer). It’s really hard to feel left out of the “in” crowd of the Ashton Kutchers of the world, watching them interact with people and knowing you’ll never be able to contribute. It’s really pathetic, although slightly humorous, to watch Brent Spiner tweet something personal and then spend the next day defending himself against unseen attacks. But still frustrating (although I really don’t want to see that drama).
And question #2, feeling hurt is a waste of time. It changes nothing except how you feel about your day.
I swear Monnik and I are twins! Well except for that tiny little having kids difference. 😛
I’m in the same boat. Now that I started blogging everyone already knows what is going on so they don’t need to ask me how my weekend was and such. (which I actually miss) So know I find myself not sharing much with those same people just so that I *do* have something to share on my blog. Yes, I think too much.
Wait…you’re in school? How are you fitting that in around working in the music business?
This is huge.
So if I sign up for Teh Twitter I can follow Becca *and* Data?
Must re-think decision to remain Twittless.
Quiz answers:
1. = d. The Twittee interpreted your sudden nonfollowing to be an indication of your disinclination to remain intertwittive.
2. = g. Reply with links to the appropriate URL.
Thank you all for your well-thought out answers!
Monnik, I knew it was within an hour because I subscribe to something that monitors your followers and sends out the following message when someone drops you: “I notice @person has stopped following you.” That way, the person gets a mention and knows you know they dropped you. I found out about it because someone had done it to me. Humiliating!
kb, I have some who I interact with and others who I just follow but since this guy isn’t into interaction even if we follow each other, why should he care?
Also, I like the way you think but I’m human and feel hurt even when I tell myself not to. 🙂
Kari (and Monnik, your twin), do you find yourself saying, “I know I said this on my blog but…” Because I do. Then we can both pretend that person has read it.
Alex, you may have noticed that someone just did that to me on Facebook. Dude, if you haven’t been reading my status messages for TWO MONTHS, why did you friend me?
Sarpon, you’re not just going to do bad puns, are you?
1. That’s a possibilitwee.
2. I should but then he’d see that I just blogged about him so I’ve now ruined that. D’oh!
RE: “Dude…why did you friend me?”
The answer is, “Because Facebook does not offer an option called, ‘I just want to see your photos and find out what’s happened to you since high school.'”
No idea about Twitter.
As to the blog, how about a & b? “Thanks for asking…I’ve been doing x,y,and z. In fact, I just wrote a whole lot about it on my blog! Take a look.”
The Facebook friend who is clueless actually has a reasonable explanation. If you go to your home page, you get a sampling of friends’ postings and status updates, not all of them. I didn’t realize this and was under the impression that posting something on my status would be as efficient a way of telling all my friends something as sending a mass email. It’s not. Particularly if someone has quite a few friends, I might never turn up on their home page and they might not take the trouble to visit each and every one of their friends’ pages to see what’s new. I believe there is a home page button you can click to see all status updates but do people all do that? (I do it…now.) And if someone visits Facebook rarely, he or she is only going to see my current status, not all the ones that have been posted in the interim.
And then there is the whole category of people who just add you to the list with no intention of looking at your page, communicating with you, etc. Some of the requests I get are so “????”-inducing I don’t think they even want to look at my photos and see what I’ve been up to since high school. They just seem to believe one is supposed to friend-request every name one recognizes.
Alex, alas, I have seen him many times since childhood. But I know the type!
Celia, as always, there’s more info that changes things a bit. I actually have said that to him before in a casual way, because I had written something I thought would particularly interest him. He said, “send me a link!” He never came. I think it’s safe to assume at this point that he just doesn’t want to read my blog and that any more suggestions will just be seen as pushy. But I think about it, I really do.
Re: FB, I don’t think that’s true. I’m pretty sure your home page only gets a sampling of different events, photos, etc. but does stream every single status message as well as every time a friend writes on a mutual friend’s wall and every time a person posts a link or video on their own wall.
From the Facebook help page:
“We’ve updated our home page to make it easier to understand what’s going on with the people you care about. Now your friends’ posts are streamed in real-time and you have more control over what you see.”
Not to mention, as you’ve probably noticed, you’d have had to have seen not a single update of mine in the last two months to not know my plans, since it’s been the substance of 90% of them.
And it’s because I see his updates all the time that I know he’s a pretty frequent visitor to Facebook. I could tell you quite a lot about his current activities even though he’s someone I haven’t seen in a couple of years.
I think, in conclusion, he’s just a dork.
I enjoy the blog *and* the occasional “hey how’s life” email since there are certain things I would never “blog comment” about (what is the word for that…a clogment?)
I still refuse to sign up for Twitter or Facebook fo a multitude of reasons which I will not bore anyone with.
Don’t tell the world about my superfluous second head, KP. You swore!