Displaying the quantities of an attribute associated with online activity are one way that social networks perform a measure of one's "effectiveness" in a social network.
Effectiveness, that term is highly subjective to the individual account holder in this social network. But what is this drug of numbers when the meaning of it is coordinated through the "mass-effect" of a larger group of people participating in the same thing? That drug is influence, and the number represents one's level of influence by the quantity of activity one has effected.
What is a hashtag? It's a freight designation on the information superhighway. What is that freight? It is human discourse, interaction, a species of self-aware designation of branding, typing, characterizing one's online speech so that it may find a destination.
What's the concession here? We're altering the interaction of faces in spaces to their onilne equivalencies for the sake of being, at once, alone and together.
What is the upshot of that? According to 1990s research into computer mediated communication the relative paucity of sensory input reduces the stress of revelation to another, the stress of disclosure, and it enhances the grandeur of anonymity, whose very grandeur is characterized by allowing each interlocutor to remain in their private fantasy while participating. This online interaction captures that one ecstasy allowed in the masquerade ball, anonymity and its performance in the absence of true obfuscation. Anonymity allows freedom, which in turn, provides an impetus to indulge in personal fantasies. While not always anonymous, participants in the social network are unfettered by the normal coordination infrastructure of meeting in space, active listening, and the repression of psychological and biological leakage. Being alone yet together in this context is another form of mediation that breeds a kind of freedom specifically that it allows each to play the jester to a larger crowd afforded by the infrastructure of being online, first, in a large group, and second, participating in the freight language of tagged discourse. Using the @ and # sign reveals the gemini of communication, transportation. And in trafficking our interactions and our identities in this social network like freight, we generate a social currency effected both by the quantity of people involved and their disparate co-presence within this place.
What keeps us coming back is the sheer revelry in communication with one another sometimes with the feeling of being alone and sometimes with the conceit of allowing others to hear you. This sheer revelry is underscored by a psychological demand to not be alone; a demand to take that genie for a walk, that genie who has been living inside us for so long; that genie who we mistake for us but is the product of so much time spent creating a world wrapped in our neuroplasticity. That neuroplasticity, those sculptures of mind crafted by us and for us, is itself a product of time, our time interfacing with the deep time of culture and the life time of ourselves. And we have come full circle with a mind made from so much brain, which is itself made from so many neurons, which themselves are specialized versions of the somatic neurons that developed to sense an environment. What our mind 'see's and our mind 'wants' is simply to interact with things in the world like it be they people, animals, plants, the vast and changing seasons, or here, interacting with our discourse-mirror the television+keyboard that is the roadbed of our information superhighway interface. Algorithms work, electronic penpals stacked and categorized on the 'home' page of our social network work, pets work, routine works. all life works to sustain us and to take us out of our personal mental trap if only for a moment, to participate in the symphony of coordinated play, interaction, something to give the mind-qua-rodent-incisors something to gnaw upon.
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