One of the paradoxes of social organisations is that the more egalitarian they are on the surface, the more hierarchical they are underneath. Thus, the House of Commons is more class-bound than the House of Lords, the Labour party more rigidly stratified than the Conservatives, and comprehensive schools more cliquey than Eton College. Of nothing is this more true than Twitter.
Twitter, as I am sure you know, is the social networking site of the moment. What Facebook was to the autumn of 2007, Twitter is to the spring of 2009. Soon, you will not be able to open a newspaper or switch on the radio without hearing about it. If the zeitgeist was on Mastermind, Twitter would be its special subject.
Not all social networking sites purport to be egalitarian. ASmallWorld, for instance, has been dubbed ‘snobster’ on account of its invitation-only policy, while LinkedIn caters to high-flying professionals. Twitter, by contrast, is open to all. Anyone can sign up and, for the time being at least, it carries no advertising. Unlike Facebook, which sold a 1.6 per cent stake to Microsoft in 2007 for $240 million, Twitter has yet to generate a single penny of revenue. No doubt its owners will monetise it shortly, but at present it is a kind of socialist utopia.
At least that is how it appears. Dig a little deeper, and the fissures soon become visible. For one thing, the main driver of Twitter traffic is the sheer number of celebrities on the site. Anyone can become part of a star’s virtual entourage — all you have to do is set up a Twitter account, do a search on their name, then click ‘follow’ when you’ve found them. After that, you’ll be able to read all their ‘tweets’ — descriptions of what they’re up to at any given moment in 140 characters or less. Jonathan Ross’s Twitter name, for instance, is @Wossy and his tweets consist of messages like this: ‘My wife and her friend are having St Tropez tan applied upstairs. I am going to spy on them, like Bill Oddie on Springwatch.’
The interest shown by the hoi polloi (the lumpen twittertariat) in celebrities is not reciprocated. If you click on a person’s Twitter profile you can see the number of people following them and the number they’re following. As a general rule, the greater the discrepancy between these two figures, the higher the individual’s status. For instance, Jonathan Ross has over 100,000 followers, but is only following 256 people. By Twitter standards, that is unusually democratic. William Shatner, for instance, has 15,437 followers and is following precisely four people, one of whom is the director of the new Star Trek movie. Alan Carr has almost 5,000 followers and is following one person: a Radio 1 DJ. It is almost as if Twitter was invented to illustrate H.L. Mencken’s definition of a star: ‘A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn’t know.’ The exception to this rule is Stephen Fry, who takes Twitter’s egalitarian ethic more seriously. To begin with, he made a point of conscientiously following everyone who was good enough to follow him, but he appears to have drawn the line at 50,000. He now has over 200,000 followers.
The number of fans you have is not the only status indicator on Twitter. Another telltale sign is how you describe yourself in your ‘Bio’. As a general rule, the more surrealist and off-point you are, the better. For instance, Will Self’s reads ‘I want to be misunderstood’, while Peter Serafinowicz calls himself a ‘non-sexual prostitute’. The idea is to give the impression that the last reason you’re on Twitter is to promote yourself. Contrast this with Britney Spears: ‘Yes! This is the real Britney Spears! We’ve got updates from her team, her website and yes, even Britney herself!’ Other status indicators include the length of time you’ve been twittering (the longer, the better); the frequency with which you tweet (the more, the merrier); and how good you are at summing up a thought in 140 characters or less. Dividing a thought between two tweets, for instance, is an absolute no-no.
No doubt Twitter will drop the pretence of being socially democratic before long, and at that point it may become a genuinely levelling force. The flipside of the egalitarian paradox is that organisations that celebrate elitism tend to be much less hierarchical. I look forward to the day when @Wossy is followed by as few people as he is following.
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