Karen Monroy

I am torn about flushing the Dalai Lama. Maybe I should start from the beginning.

No, I didn’t name an aquarium fish the Dalai Lama—although I think that would be a perfectly divine name for a fish. Wait, I am digressing and that isn’t the beginning.

Don't flush me!

In the beginning I signed up for twitter. Just a short while ago actually. I hung out, read tweets—didn’t do too much. My intention was to learn about twitter. There was lots of buzz about it—you know everyone was “doing it”. After I registered, everyone  “doing it” turned into 6 folks I knew. 4 of them, I didn’t even know that well.

Then I realized not only was there a big learning curve with twitter, my personal techie learning curve was going to be big. I am not a techie. My assistant has to do all of the techie stuff.  One assistant is hired help; she gets paid actual dollars—but the other is my hubby. My hubby likes being my techie because he thinks he builds sex credits. I let him think that, but lets keep that a secret–just between us.

So in my learning curve I noticed everyone else with any significant number of followers seemed to have a system. The systems were varied, and one thing I didn’t like: they were all designed to “get followers”. I am not a Cartesian (that is a big fancy Ph.D. word that means a follower of Rene Descartes—the philosopher. Yes he is dead. Been dead a long time now, but I am not holding that against him).

Not a Cartesian means I think if I tweet and no one hears my tweet, I still tweeted. Meaningful to me is meaningful enough. Anywho—all these other twitter systems they came with a catch. Then I found one that wouldn’t tweet commercials from me in exchange for something else.  How many favors can one gal owe anyway?

Seriously, I am not willing to sell my soul or my tweets for a few lousy followers. The twitter application I like appears it would handle the business of twitter in a respectful and personal way. Not to mention I could revoke its access at any time with no lingering effects. Even Twitter itself gave it the authorization access; it had to pass some kind of review—right?

Here is what I have learned about the twitter system I thought would help with my learning curve; “very much a beta” is translation for “information we give you is very much wrong”. I want to “very much tell them” where to put their application. And no, I do not want to donate to their paypal account to support further application support. If you ask me that fine print, shouldn’t be so fine.

This is where flushing the Dali Lama comes in. In this certain twitter application you can “flush” all of the folks you are following but not following you. At first blush, I thought that sounds good. Then I realized there is a reason (or so it seemed at the time) I was following these folks in the first place.

I needed some kind of criteria to decide if I should flush anyone. So I came up with the highly educated but arbitrary criteria of dividing folks into two different categories: Those who seemed should at least give a courtesy follow (seriously, Mo Rocca, how hard would it be to follow?) and those who, well, for a variety of reasons would have a hard time following anyone.

I put the Dalai Lama into the hard time category. Not because he has “his holiness” before his name; but because he doesn’t own a phone! Well at least when I met him he didn’t have one. It’s true he could have been hiding it in all those robes, he could have for that matter, been doing all sorts of things in those robes. But he wasn’t. At least I am pretty sure he wasn’t.

I also noticed none of his posse (yes, I know that is not what they are called-it’s a joke. Take a breath would ya?) had any instruments of the wireless technology sort. I have to admit, now that I think about it I am suspicious. I mean someone had to sign him up for twitter—right?

Unless of course it is a prank and there is some little person with a Napoleon complex who is pretending to be His Holiness………..hmmm. I think I may be onto something.

So maybe I should flush the Dalai Lama after all? No. Won’t take the chance with my karma. But WangDong? Oh yea, he’s gone. So is Angela Davis. I am sure I only followed them for their names—just to, you know, see if they were the real thing.

Mo. I am on the fence with you. But I think my karma can afford it. On the other hand maybe I’ll just name a goldfish after you.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 20th, 2009 at 1:01 pm and is filed under Musings about twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.