Twitterpated
A new way for The Man to keep track of me.
March 13, 2008
By Joshua Anderson
It is pretty well known that the emergence of various online phenomena like blogs and vlogs work to fuel a certain self-satisfaction in terms of one's ego. In short, it has taken popularity to a whole new level. A weblebrity, as I've heard them called, is essentially a really really really popular person on the internet. Somewhere between a real celebrity and just some schmuck with a blog.
Another aspect of people's increasingly proliferated presence online as a mode for self-marketing is one I think many people who don't ever use the internet preach constantly: the relative ease with which The Man can now track you down and keep you under his heel or boot or whatever else he wants to keep you under. My usual response to this has something to do with an elaborate campaign of disinformation I've waged to throw them off my scent, but usually we both know this is crap.
The danger - for the individual on the internet - is when his or her opinions and actions that flow out of said opinions are generally understood to be a big no no by The Man and his Feds and/or Spooks. Luckily, most folks on popular online social type sites are more into sexy party pics and fashion trends, so the department that oversees Facebook and Myspace is busy only to the extent that hot new party pics are posted by upstanding sorority organizations every weekend.
One site that I've recently stumbled upon is notable: Twitter. It's a sort of mini-blog set up in a format designed to let you keep track, or "follow" other Twitter members and allow oneself to be "followed" in return. Depending on your level of popularity your ratio of followers to followees will vary. Luckily, The Black Rabbit is not very popular, so the Feds haven't caught up to me yet, though I've only been on Twitter a day or so. One of the things that allows Twitter to exist is the wedding of internet life with advances in cell phone technology, namely that monolithic stepping stone in history known as text messaging. Now you can post a 140-letter "twit" (?) on your site after every class or bar you crawl out of or into, though this is where I personally draw the line. You will never see The Black Rabbit, cell phone in hand, clicking away with his thumbs on a tiny keypad because let's face it: it makes you look like an idiot.
Wake up, Neo... The Matrix has you... follow the black rabbit.
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