I love Twitter, but like most when they first encounter the application, I had no idea what it could possibly be useful for. Now after using it regularly for the last 3 months (I have had an account for over 18 months) I kinda know what I am now doing.
Like most people I find it useful for keeping up with my friends and fellow students at Curtin University. I follow industry figures, companies updating product information, and news providers helping me keep up o date with the world. All up, I now find Twitter a useful tool in my day to day arsenal of keeping me connected with the world.
Yet one thing still puzzles me about Twitter: The random follow. Nearly everyday I get random follows from people I haven't followed or even know. Don't get me wrong, I like having a few followers, but I'm still trying to work out why they would follow me!
I'm nobody special, I tweet mostly about my life, the good things, the bad things, the mundane. Yet here they are people I don't know, following my life. Then it struck me Twitter is like a virtual Truman Show, it allows people to peer inside someone else's reality, albeit in brief 140 character chunks. Twitter is the Big Brother of the digital generation, a real life reality show where we are the stars.
So is this desire to peer into anothers world driven by a sense of voyeurism or a feeling of insignificance within our own lives? Maybe following someone random is just a way to escape from our everyday world for just a moment.
No comments:
Post a Comment