Miscalibrated Internet Receptor Stalks
Miscalibrated Internet Receptor Stalks

For reasons mostly unknown to me, one of my social media accounts gained a relatively large number of followers over the weekend—more than doubled. Me, I come from the Livejournal way of communicating on the web. You have your public face, and then you can whittle audiences down to one person and tell them all sorts of truths, all there in the same platform, easy as pie. In fact, one of the reasons I'm inactive on Facebook is that I had too many friends-who're-not-friends, and there was nothing I wanted to say to all of them and it was too much of a pain to try and exercise audience control.

But when you tweet or you tumblr, you're telling mostly the same stuff to your sister as you're telling to any random stranger that walks by. How do you edit yourself in that scenario. DO you edit yourself? Do you talk to the faceless strangers, or is there some agreement that everyone is politely hidden, like Kabuki stagehands dressed in black? Do you make friends? Apologies? Take requests?

Are there expectations out there to be flouted? Surely you follow some people you don't know and who aren't celebrities. Why do you follow them? What do they do that makes you wish you hadn't? Why haven't you unfollowed them yet? Apart from that not being a word, clearly...

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