#1194 Validation Twicket

I wonder if some psychiatrist or psychology doctoral candidate has looked into the phenomenon of “followers” in our present culture. I wonder if there will be a drug for it soon.
Tweetsil perhaps, or Facesac.
You can go to various places, Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace and observe the amazing trend of people and their peeps. The “followers” and their little pictures arrayed on one side of their main webpages.
I think it’s interesting that as our culture has become less and less physically interpersonal through the incessant technological intervention of text, tweeting and what not, that people feel even more impelled to proclaim that they have friends.
They never see the friends. They never go out with the friends. But they safely text and tweet them till they’re blue in the thumbs. Perhaps with this lack of social intimacy a need comes to assert that they really do have friends. So they need a list of followers to validate them as people.
So if that list is on Twitter, is it their validation twicket?
The “followers” are their way of saying, “Hey look everybody, I’ve got friends.” “And look how many. And look at all their cool thumbnail-sized pictures.”
Interesting. I have enemies. I have acquaintances. I even have a few friends. But I would never call my friends “followers.” They are independent people with independent lives and independent thoughts. I’m careful not to be friends with sheep or ditto heads. So I sure wouldn’t want any of my friends to be a “follower.”
Maybe the social networking people don’t know what being a follower means.
They obviously don’t know that “twitter” has another meaning too. In the dictionary, one definition of “twitter,” other than the noise brainless little birds make, is the meaning “one who twits.”
In this case the term “twit” means to taunt. To twit someone else is to taunt them. Or as the dictionary puts it: “To taunt, ridicule or tease, especially for embarrassing traits or faults.”
So does that mean if I were to taunt one of the twitter follower people for being embarrassingly in need of showing he has friends, I would be twitting a tweeter?
America, ya gotta love it.