the twitterverse

I just looked at the Meteor Shower Improv Group  fb page (We had a big kerfuffle over choosing a name a couple years ago.  I championed The Silver Hamsters (Silver because of our hair, Hansters because we are a bunch of hams.  Clever no?  But when the vote was  taken Meteor Shower carried the day, even though what does that mean?) and about half the people in the group are members of the page.  Of the half who aren't on the page most have emails, but I don't think they read them very often. 

As I said the reason I started the page was so that we could have discussions there and not waste time during the class, but that has not worked out so well. Well anyway I had an idea of what I thought would be a pretty cool skit, but I knew that if I tried to explain it in class it would like take forever, there would be questions and objections and so on and so on.  So I explained it on the page.  This gave me an opportunity to have my say without interruption.  I didn't get the feedback I had hoped for, but when I went to class four or five of the members had read it, and they liked it, and we tried it out. 

Here would be the point where I would say that the fb followers had more power than the rest of the group because they were aware of what the skit was and the others weren't.  But right away I see that this is a bad example.  I was thinking more of political parties. where most everybody is vying for power.  That's not the case with Meteor Shower, most people just like to show up and do whatever they are told which is fine.  I'm getting into the whole thing of leaders and followers which is an interesting topic, but not what I am thinking about.

I guess what I was thinking about is what they call the twitterverse.  You know they get excited and start tweeting about something, and most of them are pretty important people.  If you are an important person you have to be on twitter so maybe the people on twitter are more important then Joe Sixpack, and the regular media pick up on that and report it and the implication is that this is what's going on.  But it's only going on in the twitterverse.  I am thinking that the more progressive dems are the ones more likely to be on twitter, and that's why we hear so much more about the more progressive candidates, but when the polls are taken it is the more moderate candidates who are ahead.  And those boring outrages about somebody saying something politically incorrect are chiefly in the twitterverse while most people are not that upset.

I have kind of rambled on, but now I see a path forward.  I have spoken a lot about the twitterverse, but I have never been there.  I am going to have to go there so I can report to the learned fellows of The Institute.

That friend of mine, Steve, who I was writing about a month or two ago is having a remembrance down in Champaign this weekend and I will be leaving Friday morning so I won't be posting then, and maybe not Monday.