Aaron has 2,489 followers on twitter.
When he started following me March 13, it felt a little strange. He was only following 65 people at the time. Now he’s up to 69.
Normally, I’d have a strange tinge of embellished pride if someone so discerning started following the brain lint I put out on twitter.
This was a different matter.
Aaron is one of my students. In the eleventh grade, he has over 1,000 more followers than I and has a little more than 1300 fewer tweets.
The whole thing made clear to me the fact that social structure and hierarchy are subjective in online environments.
Add to that the possible number of empty accounts I’m following or who are following me and then apply that same reasoning to Aaron’s account and the perceived prestige connected to higher or lower numbers in the physical world crumbles.
My human drive is to make meaning, but the schema I’m equipped with doesn’t apply.
All these tweets in and I’m still trying to decide what makes someone worthwhile on twitter. I’d like to think it’s more than virtual speed dating, but I’m not sure.
Beyond all of this, I was curious about Aaron’s relationship to twitter. Easily, I could have written him off as another teen statistic engrossed in his social media like all the kids these days. But I’ve sat through that argument and read that study.
Today, I sat down with Aaron to talk about twitter. Our conversation is posted below.
Aaron and Twitter by MrChase
If you have any follow-up questions, feel free to post them in the comments, and I’ll make sure Aaron sees them. Then again, you could just hit him up on twitter – like 2,500 other people.
Amazing content. Kudos for the idea and to Aaron for sitting down and talking about it. Tell him he's exactly the kind of confident topic expert that our Internet-based world is looking for!