Yesterday I joined Twitter, and after twenty four hours I am already suspicious about what is really going on in the mystical world of social media.
The basic idea behind Twitter is you follow people you are interested in and when they ‘tweet’ a comment, you get to read about it on your home page.
Now I’m interested in politics, sport and journalism. The first person I followed was Wil Anderson (Australia comedian and former journalist) as I think he’s pretty funny. I then followed several journalists, news sources, the mighty Arsenal FC and an assortment of Australian politicians.
Now I chose to follow both the recently re-elected Prime Minister Julia Gillard and the Opposition leader Tony Abbott. I thought as a journalist it would be wise to make sure I hear the policies of both major parties before I retweeted anything absurd.
So this morning I was unpleasantly surprised to find out Julia Gillard is now following me on Twitter!
From this I can only conclude one of two things. Either Julia Gillard is actually a robot, and therefore doesn’t need to sleep, thus giving her time to check her Twitter account and see what the 37, 267 people she is following have been tweeting. Or Julia Gillard has a small selection of her staff designated to managing her Twitter account for her.
Logic would hint at the latter of the two conclusions, but then it raises the question of why Julia Gillard wants her henchmen to monitor my tweets. I can see the logic of us (the voters) wanting to hear what Julia (our grand leader) is saying, but my own conclusion from my first day on Twitter is that politicians are using Twitter as a guise for polling, marketing as well as general lying and cheating.
The New York Times’ Noam Cohen writes, “Twitter — a microblogging tool that uses 140 characters in bursts of text — has become an important marketing tool for celebrities, politicians and businesses, promising a level of intimacy never before approached online.”
This doesn’t make me feel too confident about anything I read on Twitter in the near future, who knows how many tweets are actually written by ghost writers. If you think about it, social media is the perfect tool for politicians. They can speak directly to the voters without scrutiny from journalists. No one would know if they are posting or not so they are free to go about baby kissing whilst their public relations team churns out the tweets.
Of course not all tweets you read are like that. I’m sure most people do their own tweeting, but like my cynical former teacher Asbjørn Slot Jørgensen once told me, “If your mother tells you she loves you…..check it out!”
Thoughts from a Viking land 