Social network climbing

MANILA, Philippines - I used to be a social climber. I’ll admit. There was a point in my life that I wanted to be one of the people that got featured in magazines and showed up in event pictures in the lifestyle sections of newspapers and magazines. I was young and stupid — well, maybe not that young but I was definitely silly. I learned quite late in my youth that being featured in magazines doesn’t mean you’re interesting. People got featured in magazines because they did interesting things. Notice the difference?

It was much harder for us young social climbers, back in the early part of the 21st century. This was the pre-Facebook, hell, even pre-Friendster era and there weren’t any famous bloggers yet. You had to read the newspapers to find out what the most happening event in town was and you would have to choose which ones you were going to go to, which ones offered you a chance to shine. You would then go there and pray to the social gods that someone would take your picture and it would land in the papers. Maybe someone you knew who knew someone who was “worth knowing” would introduce you and let you in the secret circle of the “in crowd.” 

Yeah, this was the early part of the first decade of the 21st century.

The Rise Of The Internet

The Internet has changed the entire landscape now. Everyone has a Facebook and/or Twitter page. You can now quantify your popularity by the number of “likes” you have per posting and how many followers you have. Even bloggers have their followers and you can “like” their entries and have site statistics to tell you what the traffic has been like.

My early 20-year-old self would have creamed his pants in total glee.

I can’t forget this line from the television show MTV Awkward. The lead character’s best friend, Tamara, related that “a person’s popularity is directly related to the number of red cup pics they have posted online.” I laughed out loud at that one. The red plastic cups you drink from at parties have become a visual virtual status symbol to the net-savvy teens of this generation, it seems. The more you have, the higher you ascend the social stratosphere.

I can imagine a slew of ways the Internet has made social climbing so much easier. In Facebook, party pics ranks number one, for sure. The number of friends and the number of “likes” on your posts can be rank two. Comments can be third in the ranking. Twitter has different methods. Number of followers, number of retweets, number of tweets that were clicked as “Favorite,” and I’m thinking that when you’re quantifying these, it counts as three if any of the above is a celebrity.

This is a delightfully challenging task if it weren’t so pointless. Again, I go back to the lesson I learned after five years in this futile task: at the end of the day, it’s not who you know that makes you interesting, but what you do.

Climbing The Right Ladder

You want to be talked about? You want to be famous? Then do something worth talking about. Social media networks are the best platform to showcase your talents and your individuality. There is a famous maxim that is taught to many artists and that is “show, don’t tell.”

Show them what you are all about. Don’t tell them. Show them what you’ve got in your head. Do things that are original, groundbreaking, and thought provoking. And then you’ll notice more and more people will “like” what you post and retweet what you put down.

Growing up, I’ve learned the adoration and the attention isn’t what drives me. It’s loving what I do and doing good work. People will zero in on that and you will discover a better kind of high: appreciation. Don’t do it for the glory. Do it because it fulfills you and it makes you happy. That will get them to come.

I’ve long since abandoned my social climbing ways. I finally saw the futility of the exercise and it never did much for me. I’m enjoying being just like everybody else now, doing my own thing, and finding joy in the occasional moment when someone “likes” my poem. I worked so hard on it and laid all my cards on the table. So I only got one “like”; so what? At least someone did and that really should be enough.