Social Media Slutting

I'm coining a new word: Slutting. As in:

slutting [sluht - ting} - verb

the practice of aggregating as many social media contacts as possible, substituting quantity for quality of contact

Even when I don't post updates on Twitter, I get several notices every day that someone I've never heard of is now following me. In my small Twitter universe, I am being followed by both Karl Rove and Splashhotties, which I think indicates quite a cultural range. Or, perhaps, that there are a lot of people out there who are doing the social media equivalent of SPAM. That is, they're following thousands of other people not because they're interested in what those people are doing but because they hope the people will do the same for them.

Call the practice slutting; it can be done for both commercial and non commercial purposes. That Splashhotties and Karl Rove, both running fairly sophisticated marketing programs, would want as many connections as they can get surprises me not at all. (And I have no illusions about how personal these communications are.) But there is also slutting going on among just regular folks. I have a friend who has a neice, and when I first signed up on Facebook my friend asked if I would "friend" her niece. I assumed the niece to be a plain-but-goodhearted gal as new to Facebook as I was, only to "friend" her and discover that she was a seemingly normal grown-up with a happy familiy and more than 600 Facebook friends.

The niece seems very nice, but she's keeping score. And that, my friends, is "slutting."

Comments

[The Science Goddess]

I don't know that I could compete with Karl Rove (and don't want to) or be as impossibly slutastic as Splashhotties (and don't want to), but would certainly follow you if I knew your handle. Where o'where can Tom be?

[Peter J]

If I had Karl Rove following me, I'd call the cops.

[NewMexiKen]

Saturday, my second day on Twitter, someone wrote a tweet about unfriending a person on Facebook.

That's when I turned off the computer and took Don Quixote down from the bookshelf.

[Tom]

It's nice you took Don Quixote off the book shelf. Now if you can just get Prince Albert out of the can...