You are currently 0.0000000000000014% as famous as Justin Bieber

The tyranny of follower-watching

You stop. Stare. Your ego squirms. It will take you, you know, quarter of an hour before you can think about anything else. You glance again at the screen, hoping it’s a mistake. But it isn’t a mistake. There it is, the number: you have one less Twitter follower than you did last time you logged on.

Was it the person who just added you whose name you don’t even recognise? Was it the underwhelming tweet you wrote about buying a new pillowcase? Are your tweets too personal? Are they not personal enough? Should you have put a link to something instead? What if people don’t like links? How will you ever know?

I’m relatively new to Twitter, but as someone with strong opinions and little in the way of a fan-base, I must be one of the rare people to actually lose followers by tweeting. So painful is the feeling that I’ve actually started covering the follower number with my hand every time I log on. My best policy for retaining my pitiful audience (round about 100) is to either adopt a neutral tone, soberly pointing out interesting links like a helpful gallery curator, or, better still, refrain from tweeting at all. Depressing as it is, I can’t help but relish the irony that a hundred people are prepared to click on a ‘Follow’ button in order to listen to me not saying anything.

Auto-gagged: why does social media make me more conservative?

I opened this essay with an account of losing a follower not because it’s important, but rather because it’s laughably unimportant (how many people killed in civil conflicts this week?) and yet my ego doesn’t seem to understand that. I may be wrong, but I suspect I’m not the only one weak, vain and facile enough to obsessively watch and worry about my follower count. What’s come as a surprise to me, and a somewhat perturbing one at that, is how this fear of losing followers has changed what I tweet about. Far from encouraging a ‘sharing’ mentality, as social media are almost universally acknowledged to do, it’s actually made me more conservative. Gone are the stupid jokes, the pointless comments. Gone are the links to YouTube clips that only me and four other people on the planet think are funny. Gone, in other words, are almost any traces of that cloud of infantile bombast my few Facebook friends have come to know as ‘me’. I’m auto-gagged: if I only retain followers by not saying anything, then on the whole I’ll choose not to say anything.

It’s only inevitable that in any written medium that appears before the public gaze, there will be a certain level of self-restraint. But ‘follower watching’ suggests a disquieting and compulsive side to modern netiquette. However casually it might list display it, Twitter would not be the force it is without that follower count; this simple number is currently one of the most powerful driving forces in our information economy. Why? Because it’s nothing less, for the first time in human history, than putting an exact figure on someone’s popularity.

Congratulations! Only 99.99999999998% of the world have never heard of you

If I pitched to a Hollywood exec a script about a sci-fi dystopia where citizens are required to broadcast their social standing as an integer, it would sound outlandish, even nightmarish. How would that affect our job prospects? Our friends, networks? What would it mean for people trying to build a reputation if they had to start from one that was visibly non-existent?

Well it is nightmarish. It’s not ‘1984’ (where the dystopians of the twentieth century got it wrong was to imagine that a surveillance culture, with its subsequent hive and herd effects, would be enforced by some kind of centralised authority) but it’s a seismic shift in human activity nonetheless. Everything you do, every claim about yourself, is now seen in the light of the number of people following you.

This might not matter in many situations and professions, but for those attempting to build careers in the arts and media it’s paramount. And it’s not just Twitter that wants to broadcast our popularity to us. Blogger, Google’s popular service, has the number of views your posts have attracted slap-bang in the middle of the dashboard, so that the first thing you’re reminded when you load up is how many hits you have – or haven’t – accumulated. If you try not to look at that, there’s a graph. If you try not to look at that, there’s stats and analytics. Go on, look… Many readers of this article will point out that that’s precisely the point of blogging – to satisfy readers. But by pasting these numbers in your face, they inspire a slavish obsession with the number of visitors you’re attracting and a willingness to change everything you do just to please them. They induce a note of crowd-pleasing desperation, rendering the writer little more than a hapless busker chasing the indifferent passers-by.

Reading poetry to rush-hour traffic

Whatever this number-watching does to the writing process – and in my opinion it’s like attempting to perform a poem to rush hour traffic – it’s only part of the way the web is changing. Numbers of retweets, shares, Likes, follows and hits are increasingly hardwired into the toolbar of every website you visit, so that they’re the first thing you see on loading up. Google’s ‘+1’ button, Twitter’s ‘Follow’, the Facebook ‘Like’ have spread like knotweed, begging for your click so we can assess the popularity of any site at a moment’s glance – and in turn consider our own. While it would be patronising to suggest that all this reputation surveillance instantly reduces us all to nail-biting teens perpetually checking themselves in the virtual mirror, it is interesting to pose the question: who’s nurturing the attention boom? And why?

Bombarded by the ‘bitzkrieg’

In his perceptive ‘Atlantic’ essay half a decade ago Nicholas Carr suggested how keeping an audience in a state of perpetual, infantile distraction by bombarding them with links, suggestions and moving images was central to the profit motive of the information age, the ‘guiding ethic’ of data overlords like Google. Just as TV, radio and print journalism has always battled for eyeballs because of the advertising revenue it entailed, the attention economy, with its myopic self-obsession and jittery visuals, is a powerful hook to keep people returning to a website or network. Why not tweak your page again? Why not see if anyone’s mentioned you? Tweet something: someone might listen. Researchers have noted a dopamine surge in people each time a follower is added to their count or they encounter some other acknowledgement of their existence. These are Neanderthal responses, a fizz of joy deep-wired into our makeup, as powerful as the whiff of a pheromone or a look across the street, or a compliment from someone we admire. We all like to be liked.

But while encouraging an obsession with one’s public profile may be in corporate interests, that alone wouldn’t explain the wildfire spread of popularity monitoring over the web. Rather they’re the result of unconscious axioms for the young people shaping the new information ecology: that privacy goes against the grain; that networking is fundamental to almost everything; and, of course, that everyone wants to know how many people are listening to them. At all times. In detail. In real time.

You are currently 0.0000000000000014% as famous as Justin Bieber

It’s a self fulfilling prophecy. Once those precepts are universally accepted, it is in everyone’s interests to compete in the attention economy, since failing to do so is like volunteering for social Siberia (or – and I’m starting to depress myself – a hundred Twitter followers). As someone who missed the ‘digital nativity’ by a few years – I came of age in a world of hotmail and stupid phones – I’m already instinctively uncomfortable with this mindset, but to the armies of twenty-somethings out there, refuting or challenging these assumptions would be not only stupid but logically inconceivable, like picking a fight with water. For those plugged 24/7 into the networks, there tends to be an unconscious conflation between networking and some kind of egalitarian democracy, as if by creating a Twitter account we all find our ‘voice’. But the architecture of Twitter is essentially servile – a place of followers and the followed. If the numbers were equal and every user followed and was followed by 50 people, then this wouldn’t matter, but in reality it mirrors the real world: a few celebrities, super nodes and brand-names with millions or even tens of millions of followers, a few crumbs doled out to the rest. In the age of ‘micro-blogging’ some of us struggle to be micro-popular.

But so what? After all, is any of this really so new, once you peer beneath the touchscreens? The world has always been a place of show and bluster. From Classical Antiquity to Renaissance courtiers, from Enlightenment salon wits to Sergey Brin, people have always networked, bragged, boasted, trumped themselves up. All Twitter has done is to put a value on it – an Amazon rating, if you like, on a person and their brand. Given the flow of everything else it had to happen sooner or later.

Click here to feel good about yourself

But the fact that human beings are naturally disposed towards self-doubt and insecurity doesn’t mean that these emotions should be developed more than they need to. There’s already a cosmetics industry siphoning billions around the world which plays on widespread feelings of inadequacy. The designers of clothes stores know that a combination of skinny models and full-length mirrors makes us want to buy something; the billboards, movies, pop charts and newsstands are full of semi-clad people looking better than we’ll ever look. Amongst the results – some argue – are anorexia, depression and even teen suicides for those who don’t quite measure up.

Whether you think this is all just part of the natural development of society, or a dismaying slide towards ever more introspective self-doubters unable to spend more than five minutes away from their online profiles (and you only need to get on a bus full of school kids armed with touchscreen phones to see how seriously they take social media), there’s no doubt that insecurity is a palpable social force in the modern world. In a recent large-scale Swedish study of younger women, a quarter of all respondents said they felt ‘ill at ease’ if they failed to log in to Facebook regularly, while over half reported that it made them more conscious of their own bodies. For children, such non-stop public exposure can take on more sinister dimensions, bringing all the hierarchy and exclusion of the playground into their bedroom. Since 2009 the Family Lives charity has seen calls to its cyber bullying helpline increase by 77%, as ‘The Guardian’ reports. This is more than a lament from the masses of the ‘great unwatched’, middle class media wannabes concerned about their lack of attention; an attention economy that plays on personal insecurity can claim very real victims.

[#whyreadatall?] You could have sent 6 tweets in the time it’s taken you to get through this article

So is this the dystopia we’ve created for ourselves – a population of jumpy netizens anxiously comparing ourselves to others? Any study of younger users, it will quickly be pointed out, is bound to encounter a fair bit of insecurity. It’s also important to remember the role that social networks can offer for building communities, organising protest, and expressing sympathy and fellow-feeling. I’ve seen people talk about getting older or losing a loved one on Facebook; I’ve seen people own up to doubt, sadness and ill health, and I’ve seen a tremendous amount of friendly support in comments threads, even if certain nuances of expression are steamrollered into a click on a ‘Like’ button. It’s just a shame that the sharing culture comes with so many unforeseen trappings. But if the web does frequently act as an echo chamber for our insecurities, then we can’t blame Jack Dorsey or Zuckerberg for that – their networks, after all, would be as nothing without the millions signing up to them every year. Follower counts and blog stats may play on our competitive instincts, but if we find ourselves slave to the attention economy, that’s because we’re the ones paying attention.

Now let me get back to chasing that Twitter follower…

@dalelately, July 2013