Posts Tagged ‘tweet’

It’s that time of year again.  Call it what you like.  Christmas, Festivus… or as I have taken to calling it this year, Bah-Frigging-Humbug.  Yeah, I’m not so much in the holiday spirit this year.

Except that I guess I am.

Or, rather, I realized this morning that I am no less in the spirit of the season right at this moment than I am all year long. That’s probably an important point of clarification.

I try, admittedly with a sarcastic bent, to keep the spirit of this so-called season in my heart throughout the year. It’s not always easy. In fact, on stabby days, it’s almost impossible. That one word there, ‘almost’, makes all the difference in the world.

I am so damn lucky to have that ‘almost’. I don’t give it to myself, either. That ‘almost’ is a gift to me, given by a hell of a lot of people. Those people give me the gift of a smile, or a giggle, or a big laugh. That ‘almost’ makes such a huge difference in my life.

This is my thank you to those people, for all of the times you have given me the gift of a brighter day. I am grateful to have people – you – who have helped me smile on the worst days; to you, who have made the good days even better.

To all the people I share my life with on various Social Media sites… Those social media sites that I take so much pleasure in taking the piss out of? Yeah, those. To all of you that I share time with on those sites, I thank you. I may not always tell you on a day-to-day basis that you’ve made a good difference in my life, or that you’ve made me smile, but I’m telling you now. I follow you for a reason, and that reason is that you make a positive difference in my life.

To the smaller group of people that I touch base with on a regular basis, I wish you all of the happiness that you have brought to me over this past year. The last year has been stellar, and getting to spend time – even virtually – with you has been fabulous. I hope that you and your families have a wonderful holiday together, and that the next year brings all of you many smiles, chuckles, and warmth. I don’t just mean warm weather, either.

To those of you that share more of my life than just a tweet or a status update, I adore you. You help make every single day happy for me, even when I’m a snarky bitch. You help keep me sane, even when you are active participants in my insanity. You have, without a doubt, become a part of my life. If I have brought to your lives even half of what you’ve brought to mine, then I am grateful.

To a very small few, the ones that know they have a little bit of my heart, you are so much a part of my daily life that I can’t imagine that life without you. Nor do I want to. I wish you joy. I wish you love. I wish for you everything that you have brought to me, ten-fold. I can not tell you every day how much you mean to me, but please know that every day I don’t say it, you mean the world to me. You make me feel like the luckiest person in the world.

And finally, to those of you that have my whole heart; to those of you that know the real me and love me anyhow… the feeling is entirely mutual. Unreservedly, unwaveringly, and unfailingly. There is never a time when you are not in my thoughts, there is never a moment when I don’t carry you with me into the world. It couldn’t be any other way because you are the best part of my heart. Quite simply, I love you.

*ahem*

This started out as a post about people whining on various social media sites about feeling ignored and put-out because it seemed that no one was paying attention to them.

That annoyed (and hurt) me to the point that I refrained from posting on those sites because I didn’t want anyone to catch my notoriously contagious bad attitude.

You’re welcome.

So, this weekend, I was absent from my own timelines. I wasn’t vocal. I didn’t tweet. I didn’t update my status all that much. There were messages in private from people, and I was still reading my social media streams, but overall I just shut up.

What a concept.
Shutting up.

We all know what Social ME-dia is really about. It’s the place we go to talk about ourselves, and to tell other people what we are thinking. Even when we are sharing content, it’s still ME-dia. We share what we like; what we find interesting, or touching, or inspirational. Or just plain effed up.

We hope that others find what we’re sharing worthwhile enough to turn around share it with others.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this, as long as we don’t crawl too far up our own asses.  From that vantage point, it’s difficult to be anything but… well, an asshole. And I just feel that I’ve been seeing a lot of assholes lately. I needed to see if that was really the case, or if my perception was off.

With that in mind, this past weekend, I didn’t participate in Social ME-dia.
I participated in Social You-dia.  I read, rather than typed. I listened, rather than spoke.

I found out a lot of things.

I found out that there are a lot of assholes out there. I wasn’t wrong.
I found out that a lot of people I follow are more stellar than I thought.
I saw that one of the people I am friends with on Facebook has been having a tough time.
I read a lot of really exceptional articles.
I found some really cool websites.
My heart broke a little for someone that I care about.
I missed tweets from someone that I look forward to seeing.
I saw a famous person doling out some inspirational advice.
I read some beautiful poems.
I saw some awesome artworks.
I heard some music that I quite liked.

The simple fact is that I might have missed a lot of this stuff if I had been busy finding stuff to post and share. Kicking back for a day and letting everyone else feed my mind was refreshing. It was relaxing. I’m not going to give up on the ‘me’ part of social media, but taking me out of the equation for a while was a nice change.

I’m not saying that everyone should just stop practicing Social ME-dia. If we did that, there would be nothing out there to see on the days that I – or you – might want to practice Social YOU-dia.

Not everything I read was good. Some of it – a lot of it – was simply Social Mediocrity. But remaining quiet for a couple of days really allowed me to filter the mediocrity and see the mediamazing. It’s out there if you watch for it. If you are quiet enough to see it.

For me, shutting up every now and then just might be the best thing Social Media has to offer.

By the way, I didn’t re-tweet or share a damn thing.
I barely even thanked anyone.

You might think that makes me a bitch. But think about this:

You might have tweeted something that I found completely fitting and inspirational and life affirming. Life changing, even. The fact that I didn’t re-tweet you doesn’t mean it was any less important to me.

So the next time you might think that people aren’t paying attention?

Re-think, relax…

Shut Up.

You’d think that re-tweets would be easy enough to figure out, right? Yeah, not so much. It seems that there are different types of re-tweets, for different situations. And each of them can mean something different. I like getting re-tweeted just as much as the next person, and I appreciate anyone that re-tweets me.

But there are some situations when re-tweets are just confusing.

After much research (read: time spent on Twitter), I’ve come to the conclusion that some re-tweets aren’t actually re-tweets at all, but seem to hold some hidden agenda. They aren’t really about sharing value as much as they are about something other than content.

The Karmic Debt Re-tweet. This one’s not so bad. It’s almost a ‘you scratched my back’ thing. You re-tweet someone, and almost immediately that person will grab a tweet of yours and re-tweet it. This happens pretty often, and is probably the tweet equivalent to a walk-by high five.  Mostly, I don’t have an issue with this.  However, I will admit to wondering how much useless crap is shared on twitter just because someone needs to balance the tweet-sheet.

The Pretty Please Re-Tweet. This one is hard to see, because it happens behind the scenes.  DMs are furiously flying through the ether of twitter with a request to “re-tweet this, ok?” and usually have some form of emoticon attached.  I’ve had requests like this.  I generally ignore them.  There is a vast difference between dm-ing content and saying, “thought you might like this” and saying “can you please re-tweet this”.  You know what?  If I like it, and find it valuable?  You won’t have to ask me to re-tweet it.  Please note:  There are people that do this right. I’m lucky to have some in my tweet-life.  But they are few and few between.

The Personali-tweet. We’ve all seen this.  A completely useless and valueless tweet that is re-tweeted six million times, simply because there is a “personality” @ attached to it.  I’m going to say it, because someone needs to.  While I don’t personally follow her, I think that Alyssa Milano is great.  I think that she sends out a lot of valuable information, and I think that if you had to pick a Twitter personality to follow, you could certainly do a hell of a lot worse.  But let’s be honest, okay?  Not everything she tweets is worth re-tweeting.  Seeing her name (or anyone else’s) in a tweet shouldn’t generate an automatic re-tweet.  It just shouldn’t.

And finally, we have…

The Cult Re-Tweet. These kinds of re-tweets are very disturbing to me.  I have seen – at times – my timeline filled with tweets are referencing the same article.  Thinking that it must be terrific, and worthy of my time, I click on through to the article only to find that it’s painfully bad.  Or that it barely  counts as information at all, let alone information that is worthy of sharing with anyone else.  I always wonder what the motivation is for this kind of re-tweet.  In the end, this is the saddest kind of re-tweet, because it’s a little bit of all of the worst that Twitter offers, all rolled into one tweet.  I have no idea what these tweets are about, but one thing’s for sure… they aren’t about friendship or respect.  It’s just another form of being a bot.

The biggest challenge with Twitter sometimes is finding valuable tweets amongst all of the crap.

Don’t be a Re-Tweet Sheep.

Read what interests you.
Share what you like.
Leave the rest.

"I'd rather have one true friend than a million RT mofos."

Quote via the one in a million @krystynchong

Recommended Reading: ReTweets Are Like Orgasms, by Krystyn Chong