cold discipline for solo travellers
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Now that I’ve told you the hard story of my previous post I can return to the collecting of narrative fragments and ephemera that is the hobby of my leisure hours. Having talked about fun times with Twitter favourites early last month, I thought I would take the liberty of sharing some more.
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Last time I wrote about Twitter it was to express some ambivalence, not of the viewed-from-outside kind but of the pace at which my account was attracting new and unsought followers. It’s not so much that this has settled down now, but rather that I’ve got used to it–helped in no small measure by the #followthis tag as popularised by @homage and @johubris.
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The explosion of tiny authors a-twitter is making me uneasy. One reason for this is politeness: until now, if someone who isn’t crazy, a bot or a seller of warez wishes to follow my updates, I have reciprocated, or blocked them without mercy. Now the pace at which curious strangers want to follow me is picking up, and the interests of these followers extending beyond my own. A choice is coming: keep blocking those whom I don’t want to follow, or give my twitterings up to the attention of genuine strangers? My TwitterFox extension rarely sleeps as it is; don’t make me install TweetDeck, people.
Another is rather unpleasant snobbery. I am not an early adopter in the true sense of the word by any means, but I enjoy my internet phenomena when they are of interest to millions rather than tens of millions. When everyone is talking about it, rather than mostly-everyone, it feels less fun.
The third reason is perhaps the inverse of the conventional complaint. I like to read what those are follow are reading, eating, drinking and thinking. Retweets and news tweets leave me feeling like the kid in the classroom whose classmate is smirking, “you’ll never guess what?” As with intoxicants and various sexual practices, I suppose the lesson is to abandon what you have tried and not liked without giving up the whole game.
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Out on the Weekend
30 August, 2009
in commentatrix,the social round,we are family
The señor doesn’t tweet much, but when he does, it amuses me no end.
Towit:
(All it has taken for him to join me in Web 2.0 was an iPhone. When yesterday morning I got up I found him on TradeMe, “buying the phone a present”. It was a protective carry-case.)
I enjoy the gender confusion the señor creates when we step out late of an evening. A pink-cheeked, fresh-faced, drunk twenty-year old in an Aertex Shirt bailed us up on the way to the grim venue above, to shout “You look like a girl!” (to which the señor cheerfully exclaimed, “you look like a dickhead”). Earlier, a curly-haired man in a trilby hat had chatted up our booth of drinkers at our wedding joint, before exclaiming, “oh shit, there’s a guy there!” Earlier still, at the house-party at which the revelry started, a former student of mine poured me boysenberry wine while expressing a wish to dress the señor’s hair. She later attempted freehand pigtails. My beloved’s androgyny casts light on how others feel about gender binaries, and the fears and pleasures therein.
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