Social Media Is Dead -- And You Killed It

That's right. Social media (or Social Media, as its practitioners and aficionados so importantly emphasize it) is dead.

You have killed it by overdoing it--day and night, endlessly posting and re-posting. You now stay online so much that you have become antisocial in real life.

Families? Friends? Co-workers? Don't need 'em.

You tweet, therefore you are. You blog, therefore you matter. And if you can just keep it up, hashtagging often enough in one 24-hour span, you can create the illusion that you are living an exciting, important, digirati life.

Those now jumping into social media soon will discover that they have arrived too late. Social media has become oh, so two hours ago.

The New Hot Thing is...Antisocial Media (ASM).

We in ASM tweet just to tweet (and don't you "@" or "DM" or "RT" me, you rat bastard. I'm too busy posting new tweets to read anything or respond). We blog because we can--and we purposely burn up many hours in the process, so the real people around us will get less and less of our time to waste.

Who needs actual social interactions when we can flood the digital universe with ASM?

Don't answer that. And don't attempt to argue with me. Just post your own stuff and don't expect me to read it. The true practitioner of ASM doesn't even read his or her own postings.

My new book, Antisocial Media: Hashtags in Hell (LOL), will be published soon. In the true spirit of ASM, I wrote it without reading it. I let no one edit it. And I will tolerate no reviews or questions about it.

Just click on the Amazon link, charge your credit card and forget about it. Instantly, you will become another expert in Antisocial Media, and you can publish your own book on "how to boost your ASM productivity." (Suggested title: "How I Got 8 Million Anti-Followers on Twitter in Five Seconds Flat.")

I won't read it, of course. I'll be too busy tweeting and blogging about the death of Antisocial Media and the coming of the Next Hot Thing: face-to-face, offline discourse and conversations (FFODAC). (Gasp!)

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"Totally outrageous celebrity news" experiment a complete failure!

I am pleased to report that my blog took a big hit in daily page views after I posted a headline via Twitter, hyping "Totally outrageous news about today's most vapid celebrities."

According to Google Analytics, posting that "celebrities" headline apparently was the digital equivalent of blasting Dateline: Oblivion with a nuclear torpedo. Page views sank sharply, rather than increasing as I had hypothesized.

So the effort to trick new readers into rushing to my blog was an utter failure.

Apparently, many fewer Twitter-ers are enthralled by celebrity news than I had thought and feared. Excellent.

However, I did gain a number of new followers, most of them wanting to sell me something and none of them commenting on anything I have written.

Seems to be a lot of that going on these days. We're all trying to sell something to each other on Twitter: soap, world views, sensibilities, our souls, ourselves.

Thanks to all who participated in this test, and even bigger thanks to all who did not. I'm glad almost nobody really wants to read celebrity "news" from some random blog in Texas. It gives me a bit more hope for the digital world.

May the farce be with you...and also with you.

--Si Dunn


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Totally outrageous news about today's most vapid celebrities?

Blame Howard Kurtz for "inspiring" me to come up with this headline. It's one of my responses to his recent Twitter question asking us to name our biggest gripe about today's media.

At one level, this little post of mine is just a cheap trick to see if people will overlook the headline's complete meaning and its question mark and actually click on the link to my blog, thus at least momentarily boosting its circulation and generating a few angry responses.

If you hype it, they will come!

At another level, it is just one old writer's futile rant against the incessant cult of celebrity worship--which no doubt has been going strong since the days of totally cool cave people, but now is made more visible and pervasive by electronic media and the Internet.

So, sorry, you'll learn nothing new or even old about celebrities here, vapid or otherwise. My answer to Howard Kurtz's question is that the media world seems to increasingly revolve around entertainment and sports stars--and to rely upon them for survival--while many, many worthy stories, causes and issues languish or are completely overshadowed or ignored.

Hey, but thanks for dropping by. While you're here, feel free to read some of my other missives that have been blotted out by the glare of the glitterati--and the fact that there are now millions of other blogs competing for the even barest bits of attention.

-- Si Dunn

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The Next Great Crisis: Blogger's Bottom

Too many of us now are just sitting around, typing stuff and reading postings such as "OMG! She said what?! OMG! LOL!" and "Bulletin to the world: I'm BORED!"

Blogger's bottom, Twitter tush...if you're reading drivel such as this (and this), it's just further proof that BB and TT have reached out-of-control, epidemic proportions in American society.

Help fight BB and TT today. Get up from your...computer long enough to do something else for a few seconds.

LOL! OMG! ZZZZZ!

--Si Dunn

Am I Twittering Now? Or Am I Just a Twit?

This is a test. This is only a test. This is a test of my first attempt to use the Twitterfeed system.

I am much older than the typical Twitter-er, so perhaps I can be forgiven for resorting to the ancient technique that harkens back to somebody walking onto a stage five minutes before a high school assembly and thumping the microphone, blowing into it and saying: "Test, test, testing, 1-2-3-4..."

Had this been an actual article or rant, it might have contained information (a) worth reading; or (b) not worth reading.

This test is being conducted to verify that I can link my blog, which almost nobody reads, to my Twitter account, which a few people possibly read and likely wonder why they bother.

This concludes this test of the Twitterfeed system.

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