Comments on “Influence”

I know Slim. Although I find him more interesting in RL than twitter :)

he he he - I have a klout of 19 (higher than I imagined) which appraently makes me a dabbler. What lovely silly fun.

“nerds and freaks—I might be both”
‘fraid so…

You hooked me with this one, but I couldn’t sign in to get my score.

One of the folks I enjoy hearing on the radio sometimes, Caroline Casey, tells a story about being in a subway when a visibly disturbed person was going along the queues saying ‘You’re in; you’re out; you’re out; you’re out. You– you’re in…’ She found herself becoming concerned about whether she was going to make the cut! And then amused that this should be so.

Mine is 52. :-)

Mine is 29. This explains so much about those snobs that have let me follow them, but won’t follow back. They must have higher clout scores . . .

Actually, the only thing worse than the - I have 5,000,000 followers and follow 9 people, is the diametric opposite, and all the #TeamFollowBack crap, where people feel some sort of obligation to follow back, which is incidentally the facebook model. ‘Friendship’ = atomic mutual follow back transacton. G+ went more the Twitter route of allowing independence of the followings.

Recently the twitter personality known as @Jesus posted something like “You follow me. I don’t follow you. That’s the way it is when you’re Jesus.” (which I found a nice touch of satire)

If:

Most of what we think we think, we actually just borrow.

and:

In meditation you can see that your thoughts are not “yours.”

and if “influence” is:

what you have to sayescapes into the wild

then the image that floats to mind is people appearing as cliffs on a lake, reflecting the sounds of birds and waves. My klout? -- pathetic by anyone's algorithm, I hope. That was fun, thanx!

In fact, genuinely new ideas are vanishingly rare. Most of what we think we think, we actually just borrow. Ideas are out there; some look attractive, and we grab them, and perhaps shine them up a bit, and give them back to our friends

One reason (among many) that I didn’t go into academia is that it is based on the exact opposite of this truth. Performance is graded in the industrial-strength equivalents of Klout. Somehow it works even though it combines nerdishness and popularity contests, but I never could quite reconcile them.

Mike (Klout 35, h-index negligible)