If you’re like me who tweets, basically, for venting any pent-up emotion I can translate into words, then I guess you probably know about Twitter. That silly thing said, I say it’s silly being here talking randomly when I should be doing laundry, convincing myself I shall start this afternoon (as I have been telling myself since I can remember); it’s silly sending words into this universe of words and talkers. But seriously, if you’re on Twitter, too, then you’re most likely aware of its following feature unless you’re like a friend who made a Twitter account due to my insistence and thus, hardly uses it.

So anyway, how many people do you follow? Why are you following these people? Since I started on Twitter, I haven’t come to a point where I followed more than 50 people. You see, I like my timeline as clean as possible, that is, reading tweets from people I know about personally and then some. I used to follow celebrities until not long ago when I decided to keep my timeline looking like my phone inbox and that, of course, is not something that contains random blabber from Anne Curtis or Dita von Teese.

Then there are your followers. Admit it, at some point or another, you did wish you had as many followers as Kris Aquino or at least Isabelle Daza (we’re not talking Ashton Kutcher here because that sounds like too much and gravely impossible — unless you’re some Oprah reading my blog. And… Oh, my God.) I admit to having such wishes, not that my Twitter existence depended on it, because I’m narcissistic enough to think that more people are supposed to be reading me.

Now, if you have a Twitter account, check your followers. How many do you have? What are the numbers telling you? If you think those numbers are useless statistical data, then I assume you’re either not so into Twitter or are just plain not vain enough to not care about whoever’s reading you, unless you don’t tweet at all. However, if you’re me who checks on my followers and leaps at the thought of having to cater to at least 20 followers, why do you think it’s so important to know how many people are hearing us out? Again, if you’re me (and this is not saying your brain has to run like mine), I would say it has something to do with our need to feel appreciated. The need to feel like we matter enough to be heard, to be spoken about, to be spoken to. The need to feel important, to feel like somehow, we could influence the world in our way, however unknown we are to much of it.

 

March 23rd, 2010 by Edmundo Lee