In: Community

November 2021 — Letter to Readers

Rethinking Social Media, One Story at a Time

Is he leading? Or is he leaving? [Photo by Jehyun Sung via Unsplash]

To my readers,

First, if you’re reading this, thank you sincerely for taking the time to read through the articles I’ve written, and to sign up to see more.

Have you ever wondered why social media uses the term “followers”? It’s a bit bizarre, when you think about it, because it carries with it a hidden, self-aggrandizing implication that somehow the person being followed is a leader.

I suspect that the term was used in a more passive way, originally. Maybe the original intent of the word was that a follower “follows” a blogger the way they might follow the news, or the way they might follow the antics of a squirrel trying to stuff too many acorns in its mouth? That would make sense.

But once people began applying it to social media, I think that it took on a different set of connotations — no longer was it a person following the news, but it was a person following an influencer, instead. And, of course, the notion of influencing was deeply tied in with the notion of selling, as companies tried to figure out how they could leverage social media for profit. With that development, there came a certain set of beliefs about the nature of the social media relationship…