I built a community of individuals on Twitter that are interested in the same things I am. (Cosmology, Web 2.0, Cycling, Enlightened Community Building, Baseball, Media, Art, Comedy, Environment...). I did it slowly, day by day over several months. I like my Time-line; it's become a news, entertainment and study hub.
Email notifications from Twitter inform me when people choose to follow me. I vet who I want to follow by checking their time-line, and the link to their web site if they have one. I either follow or not. In order that I have a time-line outside of twitter, I store all those notifications in my email storage. Sometimes you can't tell whether or not you want to follow, so you follow to see what happens. If they're boring, stupid, negative, annoyingly insecure over time, I 'unfollow' them.
Marketers use Twitter Search to find keywords in your tweets in order to market stuff at you in twitter, and the greater economy. There are services out there that say they can get you 30,000 follows in a week. These aren't directed at insecure facebook type friend-accumulating drones, but towards small start-up companies, usually one person, who think they can aggregate customers for sellers through Twitter.
It's all very annoying.
Also out there in Twitter-land are political movements who are networking in the best traditions of the Mastermind Karl Rove, the architect of the neo-conservative movement that elected Reagan, Bush l, and Bush ll. The same people who brought you the Iraq War, the Financial Collapse, data-mining of your electronic communications and the destruction of New Orleans are now networking with Twitter's "FollowFridays" to change Congress in 2010, and stop Obama's progressive agenda.
FollowFridays was started by the Twitter community. On Fridays people compile lists of interesting new 'follows' and bundle them together in a Tweet to a friend, and to a 'Twitter List' called #FF (List: FollowFriday).
The neo-con look to be using #FF effectively to re-organize after the Republican split leading up to the 2008 election and later. Small c conservatives and the left of the democratic party have to get organized in this same way in order the prevent these Straussian relativists from gaining enough power to neutralize Obama in the midterm elections.
A couple of days ago I received a twitter notification email from Daniel Audet a Radio host on a online radio program called TruckStar Radio.
It's like Rush Limbaugh. Relativism is the rule: thought association metrics are employed, ironical associations that don't make any sense become rules of thumb in a 'think set', (akin to worship) that are used to unite a subculture and create a community of intolerance to the outside of the group. Us and Them politics (kinda like wars that are started to distract whole cultures from social problems).
Today I watched an organized group of ultra-rightists namely the Tea Party movement networking using Twitters FriendFriday, 'TruckStar Radio' and an evangelical radio web cast represented in Twitter by @CovenantTab.
First an inflammatory Tweet is posted with a tag to a list. These are 7 of the lists I found in and around the TeaParty organizing: #prolife, #abortion, #tcot, #healthcare, #hcr #TeaParty.
Here's an example of a TeaParty Tweet:
At the list page I found the context is, President Obama is either a socialist or a communist, and the economic collapse we're in the midst of is caused by the The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
I looked up the quote in the tweet and it's actually listed in all those quote compendiums and at About.com. Can't find the context though - book, article, essay or interview - just seems to be out there (perhaps someone who knows their Mailer could leave a comment).
I'm following Mr. Audet because I thought TruckStar Radio would play Gram Parsons - so when he ReTweets @BryanLongworth's inflammatory Tweet above, I figure I'll make a joke referencing the cliche that all writers are constantly in pain, as it goes with the craft:
A few minutes later in my time-line I see my name in a #FF Tweet bundle. Here is a screen shot of it; I had to go and find it again in Twitter Search.
(The two lower tweets are the history of the conversation in a drop-down window.)
Right off I'm thinking my pro-socialist retort may be getting me on a list of targets. That 'Thanks' at the end, I start to think, looks more like a threat (Social-networking-induced-self importance-psychosis - there'll be a pill for it soon).
By clicking on the other addresses though, it turns out it's just a list of everyone whos retweeted the original. This data base is being sent to all the #lists at the end of the post. Below, CovenantTab has just received four bundles of twitter addresses.
Don't know if the grassroots movement that elected Obama are organizing using Twitter, but they had better.
With out a strong grass root movement Obama won't be able to get a single thing through a Congress that is rife with corruption, K-street lobbyists, and pork barrel politics. If Senators and Representatives don't have political lobbies by the people pushing them, they'll vote to benefit themselves and/or the corrupt centre of the party. This is the reality of the military industrial dominated economy President Eisenhower warned about in his Military Industrial Complex Speech in 1960.
It's up to us, the battle lines are being drawn right now, in Twitter.
mh
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