Twitter is a strange and wonderful thing but as a writer of faith it presents me with a very serious ethical dilemma: do I play the game and invest time and/or money to create the illusion that I am much more popular and important than I am, or do I let my little blog and feed represent who I am and whatever small circle of people might be interested in what I have to say? Twenty years ago when I sent my manuscript for Baptism by Fire to a literary agent, he snapped it up and sold it to Bantam in three weeks. In the new world order we’ve all created, publishers and agents require a writer to have several thousand Twitter followers before their proposal will even be considered.
Now, any reasonable person should be able to figure out that unless an author—which is just another name for a person who spends a lot of time alone in a room—has already been on the NY Times Bestseller list there is no way they will have thousands of legitimate followers. And by legitimate, I mean, people who actually know who they are and what they write about and want to stay in touch because of it.
No matter. As with everything in our metrics-driven world, it is the quantity not the quality that counts.
According to the “new wisdom” I should spend an hour or so every day “following” people on Twitter. Now by following I don’t mean reading the tweets of people I actually know or like or want to be like, or media feeds of non-profits that do great work. I mean trolling and clicking, trolling and clicking, trolling and clicking in the You Scratch My Back I’ll scratch Yours economy which says that the odds are the people I follow will follow me back (at least for a few days) and if I am religious about this practice, I should be able to get five thousand followers in a year, no problem. Metal Heads, Thong Designers, Day Traders, Whale Savers, Navel Gazers, TweetSellers, and the corporate offices of every chain restaurant in America—all eager to join my devoted “fan base.”
When I asked a literary agent at a conference recently why they make these numbers a benchmark when they’ve got to know it’s a false stat, she smiled sheepishly and said, “Well, you never know. With enough eyeballs on your book cover, someone might be interested.”
But that’s the second falsehood of this model: the more people you follow (to get them to follow you back) the less likely it is, statistically, that any of you will see any of each other’s tweets.
I spent many years in the advertising business so I’m no innocent to the realities of art and commerce. But as a follower of Jesus, I believe that I am called to look at these realities differently. To be able to recognize that “following” people for no other reason than that you hope they’ll follow you back is “bearing false witness.” That creating an identity based on puffing up your numbers—even if it’s for the “greater good” of the Gospel—is still serving two masters. And that relying on something other than Jesus to determine if my work will bear fruit “thirty, sixty, or a hundredfold” (Matt 13:8) is lacking in both humility and faith.
I have many young writer/theologian friends who are wrestling with this same thing. Secretly I’m hoping that they don’t feel as uncomfortable with it as I do, that they rack up ten thousand followers and I can cheer them on from the sidelines.
I can’t say how other people of faith are reconciling our “brand-building” culture with a teaching that says “we must decrease, that he may increase” (John 3:30). All I know is this: If I’ve got an hour to invest in my work, I’m going to spend that hour following Jesus. If you want to know how that’s going, you’re welcome to follow me.
Heather Choate Davis 