Followers and the Following

My readers -- the ones I bump into in the hood, on the streets of Los Angeles and in events -- have complained about the abandonment of my thorough political commentaries and Igbo-related cultural analysis I have been known for, wondering what brought about such a swift change. No. Nothing changed. It's just that I have been caught up in a cross road tweeting and having fun for the moment; and I am quite sure my followers and the ones I follow are watching with keen interest with what is about to resurface in my files. And besides that, there is absolutely politics in every game which means we are all political junkies by tweeting, feeding the world with the goings on, whether it's politics, pub-crawling, hanging out, poking around and stuff like that.

Summer just arrived, and seriously, I'm just having fun and loving every moment of it. But the real deal is social networking these days, and no one could tell how far that's going to last. So far, it seems like kinda trend that will be around for a long, long time to come.

Remember when it took days or weeks, or months, or longer than that to reach a loved one, a family member, a brother, a sister, a cousin or an uncle via the telegram, word of mouth, post office, courier service and other wire-related services? Remember? Not anymore. Things have changed. Technology has made communication much easier and has drawn the world very close. Thanks to the internet age. Just like Twitter made its followers and the following fishers of the "New Dawn" as new ideas pops up with a following.

It is really amazing how each of these social networks operates, and how it becomes addictive at any given time the moment one is hooked. I have tried to stay away from these networks which I did some many years ago, limiting myself to just few, precisely the discussion groups and messageboards I was either the owner or moderator, and which, of course, had to do with news items like NPR, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, BNW News, the print media and other news-related outlets does to keep their listeners, readers and followers informed.

What has erupted in recent times is beyond imagination based on the rate these social networks are growing creating an era seen to be heading a direction seemingly to have placed the entire universe into one bucket, otu uwa, one world.

I keep wondering how these networks pops up uniquely in their own respective rights even though all appear to be the same whether a one-liner as in Twitter, or wordy as in Yahoogroups, Messageboards, Facebook and the rest. Over the past ten years or so, and when the listserve E Group had a bigger audience, a whole lot did change from the way social networking operates on the net.

Think about My Space and what it does with Generation X an K. Or Facebook that is not leaving the web arena anytime soon. Blogged, like the crab-like cancer is doing the same thing as Twitter in the pattern of following and followers. Just like if you follow me I will follow you. Or thanks for the follow and I will follow you which has generated a huge amount of business-related conferences.

Interestingly, these social networks have their own set of rules accompanied by how money is generated to keep these links afloat, meaning every social network in today's economy aggressively pursues its own highly localized interest.

The interests, like in Facebook which has gone local with the advertisers as they encourage Facebookers to indulge in taking advantage of promoting their accounts from around which they subscribe, and as it implies, one might be smiling all the way to the bank, if at all it's not a gimmick and one of those easy money deceptive stuff that has bombarded cyberspace. Web-bloggers and web-designers are equally engaging, too. It works hand-in-hand to a level of convicing, in order to attract readers to your site and the products that you market, and how different patterns of money making opportunities could be achieved through a wide variety of techniques -- tele-conferencing, tele-marketing, social networking, business-related workshops, conventions and things like that.

I, for one, has been in a couple of these "money making" opportunities, and it boils down to getting things done by way of that fast money which is indeed a good thing. It does not work like that. Somebody is playing smart and another one playing dumb, and it all leads to greed. Other than that, social networking is a kind of counseling in many ways. It helps alleviate depressed-anxiety-related problems most faced in today's society. It is a terrific workshop for many things in life including the opportunity door knockers who would try to convince their victims that a bag full of money to the brim would be theirs in a couple of weeks if only they take a simple step. There are other schemes also that encourages the application of doing some little, little stuff for enrollment on the block of new millionaires. It's all about following and whom you follow.

The irony of all these gimmicks and a recession riddled population is that the doers and schemers are all smiling, allegedly to the bank because whatever idea they created to gun down a panicking public due to a never seen before austerity measures, works effectively. And no one is giving away these "ideas" for free, no matter what.

All in all, the Twitter nation is now prospering in the game of social networking with its 140-character post at a time, and tweeting is the name of the game. It has become an institution of its own developing and enhancing its library with vocabularies such as "We Follow" meaning a direction of interesting Twitter accounts; "Trazz-ler Buzz," meaning tracking popular travel destination via Twitter; "Tweets on tees," meaning awesome crowdsourced shirts by Threadless; "Twitterific," a fur mac application for twittering; "Stock Twits," meaning an investment idea and information service, and it goes on and on.

If Time Magazine gave the Twitter guys -- Biz Stone, Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey -- a thumbs up why shouldn't we who have found a home where there is love, affection and caring? Talk about Twitter, how about my own creative word Ohuzo and its meaning? It's a "New Dawn," people, and let's keep following and be the fishers of humankind.