Popularity revisited

(continuing my previous post)

Lesson learnt: People want to be popular, but once they are popular, they will long for their quiet life, sooner or later. (Or maybe not)

In the last post, I was talking about the trend of people are (desperately) want to be popular in virtual world. Especially with the growth of a lot of social networking, people (that I know of, ranging from teenagers to my peers) are commonly active in popular networking sites like twitter or facebook.

(Well, I did want to be popular and luckily not that desperate.)

In this post I’d like to touch more on popularity as in getting people attention on what you’re doing.

People want to show to as many people as it could, what are they doing, how they feels or where are they. I have some connections to high school kids on twitter. I know them because I was having presentation on their school when I was a half lecturer half marketing who traveled from school to school for presentation. One of the kid is following me on my twitter, and I follow him back. I am a big fan of Firefox browser and, that time, I installed the twitter extension. The extensions enables me to receive update from my twitter. I was surprised with the amount of tweets the kid does in a day. The kid can tweet the class schedule, help request on doing school assignment, announcement to classmates, boring class, sleepiness, canteen food, and many more. I admit that I’m kind of distracted with the notification and I decided to turned off the extensions.

Another story is on facebook. I have a friend who will comment or like other people posts (almost every people). We share quite a lot of common friend because this friend is my university friend from the same batch and we did some voluntary work together. For example, whenever a friend posts something on facebook, this friend will comment on it, the owner replies and less than 5 minutes, there will be a reply to it. I used to ask my friend, are you living in facebook? This friend also post a lot of items like what should I eat for lunch? or whether I should go to gym or hang out?

Do you see some patterns here?

I’m aware that I changed in some ways too. I used to be one of them too, update the status as and when showing my feelings, then I’ll happy to see some responds from my friend. I feel like I have some morale support from my friend virtually. But I was thinking, what are the benefit for others and me. Maybe the benefit for others are to be there for your friends when they need it. I feel that whenever I complain about something (usually people update the status is to say something they disagree or whine about something) the more negative I am. So I stopped doing it.

Later I shifted to update my status to something inspirational (I like to share something good, basically) like quotes, songs and I update my thought quite often about how I feel that particular time. Whereas I focus more on sharing news and social media and some technological knowledge nowadays rather than describing how I feel that day.

My understanding to this day is that popularity in online world can be described as one of many ways for people to look for attention among their friends. There are many possibilities or reasons which supports this trends, but I’m not going to touch on that topic in this post. Other sides of the popularity that I can think of is, we like the feeling when other people care for us, the more people care about us means we are lovable (to be more extreme, some people post status in a way so that others will pity them)

So, do you agree with me? Let me know your thoughts 🙂