Recently on Cracked.com
Taken from 6 Things Everyone Wants To Share And Nobody Wants To Read.
By Christina H.
Full Article is here: http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-things-everyone-wants-to-share-nobody-wants-to-read/
Your Tweets…
The big thing about Twitter, and blogs before it, was that it was supposed to "democratize" content generation. In "old media," there was a clique at the top of the pyramid -- celebrities, corporations, etc. -- that dominated all the content, and you had to get your news and entertainment from either them or not at all.
With Twitter, so the story went, anybody could become an Internet celebrity by coming up with humorous or insightful tweets, and gather millions of followers, bypassing the "media machine." So we took away the power of the restrictive media overlords forcing people to only pay attention to celebrities, and let the public choose who they wanted to listen to.
Of course, fully wielding the freedom of choice to listen to any individual or organization they wanted to, the public chose to pay attention to celebrities.
And the celebrities, of course, are mostly listening to each other. So sure, now Joe Schmoe has the infrastructure to get his message out to the whole world cheaply and quickly, and the whole world does not give two owl's droppings.
If you think that having 248 followers means that 248 people (or almost 248 people) must be reading everything you say, I have bad news for you. A Pew survey showed that almost half of all Twitter users basically don't read a single thing anyone else says (checking "every few weeks" or even less). Twenty-one percent literally never read anyone else's tweets.
Even out of the 36 percent that checks at least once a day, that doesn't mean they're reading your tweets when they check. One blogger ran some analysis on his Twitter followers and found that they followed, on average, 2,778 accounts apiece, and unless they have very slow jobs, are clearly not reading most of those tweets.
For some people, following a person on Twitter seems to be basically their version of clicking a "Like" button on Facebook or putting a bumper sticker of that person on their car ... except the bumper sticker requires more commitment.
Even though some part of us must have known that nobody wanted to read our "I just went to the bathroom" updates, the fact that there's no real feedback on who is or isn't reading (unless you go looking for it) means it's easy to keep the illusion alive.
So we keep going with our attempts at witty bon mots and pocket philosophy, thinking we're participating in the great Internet dialogue when we are, most likely, muttering to ourselves like a homeless person.
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