Unfollowing

This post is pre-emptive. I'm having a bit of a paranoid crisis at the moment, and I'm making changes to try and fix my brain. Something that's easy to control is Twitter. I've been putting up with things that piss me off for ages on Twitter, and it's been very liberating taking control of my Twitter feed. Although, characteristically, I'm now terrified of the consequences my actions will have on real life friendships. So:

Twitter is an odd place. Following is a powerful thing. People place their self-worth in the hands of their follower count, but this number doesn't mean anything. Justin Bieber has 43,000,000 followers and I've literally never heard a peer admit to liking him. I realise my peers are not a representative sample of internet users, but still. 43,000,000.

Your follower count is related to almost nothing. Your follower count is roughly the sum of people who somehow either saw a tweet you did that spoke to them on such a level that they must instantly follow you, or liked your avatar or bio, or stumbled upon your profile and thought "yeah, I'll follow this person". It has very little to do with you as a person. Most people are totally different in a written medium - it's very difficult to effectively communicate your personality via the written word. You might think you're doing it, but you're probably not.

It's your responsibility as a Twitter user to craft your news feed as you see fit. If you're like me, you read every tweet on your feed. The first thing I do when I wake up is read everything that happened overnight on Twitter. If that stream of words is full of shit and negativity and passive aggression and other things that annoy me, that's not a great thing with which to start, or indeed continue, the day. You craft your feed by following people. If someone's too noisy or negative or constantly self-promotes or just gets on your nerves, that follow was a mistake. You should unfollow them.

Once, someone unfollowed me and I took it incredibly personally. I actually had a mini freakout and accosted this poor person via the magical medium of Twitter and forced her to deliver the brutal truth - my tweets weren't interesting to her. I swore too much and took the piss out of things she loved. She was right - why would you follow someone who got on your nerves?

A friend unfollowed me, but was pre-emptive with the rationale - I was too negative. We're still friends. In fact, we're better friends now because he doesn't hate me for being so negative all the time. It's pretty good.

I dream of a day where humans can unfollow other humans on Twitter without fear of repercussion. It doesn't mean I think you're a bad person, and it doesn't mean I don't like you. It just means that you're using Twitter in a way that I don't want to follow.