This isn’t navel-gazing, honestly. What happened was that I biffed the Tumblr-Twitter settings and yesterday’s oevre cross-posted to Twitter. Next thing I know, I have a new Twitter “follower” who’s into wine-making as well. Because he’s written a book about wine-making, specifically non-grape wine-making, which I assume was the reason I was pinged. I did give him fair warning that I probably won’t be tweeting about wine that often. Hopefully he’ll have the great, good sense to un-follow me, because it’ll be a waste of his eyeballs otherwise.
But the whole episode really stands as a microcosm of how so-called social media—I say “so-called” because I think that it encourages a more superficial form of socialization—is furthering Web 1.0’s job of “balkanizing” those with access to it.
Mind, I don’t consider “balkanization” a bad thing, not by any means. (Except, of course, it didn’t work so well in the Balkans…) Mostly because I’m (at best) a reluctant leader—“reluctant” because I think we’d live in a much better world if people stopped delegating their thinking and judgement-making, if only by half. For all that, I understand that Mr. Rivard is building his “tribe”—to use the micro-marketing lexicon of Seth Godin and Gary Vaynerchuk and a raft of folks I’ve yet to encounter. Fruit-based winemaking is an extremely focused niche, and big ol’ props to the guy if he can make a living within it.
And, who knows, I may buy the book. We make enough fruit wine—even the odd vegetable wine—that having an extra resource certainly won’t hurt. And, more to the point (of this post anyway), the social contact was made respectfully. By being “followed” I know the terms—namely that I am free to ignore the attention. And there is no attempt made to trick me into engaging where I do not want to engage. I’ll take that over spam any day.
