A culture where pathological self-promotion and aggrandizement is rewarded & silence punished is also a culture where it's very hard to demonstrate healthy self-respect.
On the one hand, you get lumped in with the grifters.
On the other, you don't make nearly as much noise.
Conversation
The internet has both attenuated and amplified these tendencies, I feel.
On one hand gatekeeping is limited, mostly a function of US companies' politics and commercial interests.
On the other hand, all informational dark arts have been democratized.
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Is silence punished? The best way to "win" at Twitter - and by that I mean gather a large and growing audience and to rarely lose followers - aside from already being famous - is to tweet only occasionally, but on a fairly limited range of popular topics.
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Strange definition of silence, to speak loudly and publicly and populate your speech with pregnant pauses.
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Lol! OK, what I mean is that silence is not the *worst* thing. You're more likely to damage your platform by tweeting too much stuff - unless it consistently enthuses a good proportion of your audience - than to tweet too little.
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Yes but this presupposes a platform which presupposes marketing (yours or someone else's) on your behalf.
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There are scaling effects to communication. I have to tweet really vile or absurs utterances for anyone to notice.
At 10000 followers, you can expect anything innocent to spread in a different light. At 100000, forget about good faith.
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I guess there's always been a playbook for self-promotion; perhaps Social Media has made it available (at least in theory) to everyone. The majority of success in that arena seems to be by people who realise you need to become a caricature of yourself to succeed.
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There are other paths, too, but being real at scale is high risk, low reward for most people.
Especially in a society full of vindictive losers who want nothing more than to cut others down.
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Oh yeah, too true. I mean for those who realise the game and want to play it - or know how to stay out of it - it's fine. For those who just sort of go with the flow I can see that it could easily be an absolute nightmare. I wonder what effect it's having on IRL discourse.