Reaffirmed through the great friend loss of 2010. A.K.A. The midterm election.

I often try things with social medium in order to gauge the reaction of others and play the role of freelance social scientist. I often think there will be some epiphany or proof gleamed from my efforts that will bring a new light to how people operate within our world. The funny thing is Facebook and Twitter are designed to make you feel more special by having people recognize every component of your mundane life and reward you for wit and class by comments and likes. Even when I am experimenting I tend to hope for positive responses, but am often surprised by how my efforts are taken.

I go through trends of attempting to be very inclusive, kind, and engaging in order to improve my responses. This does not seem to work for me as my rates of response are at an all time low statistically. I keep tabs on what people do in response to what I say in public forums such as threads and Facebook. The results are pretty similar. In fact the only responses I tend to get are negative or at least in disagreement. Even more interesting is how much more responses I receive when I am negative myself. I think Glen Beck and the like have it figure out.

Just be as crazy and negative as possible and you will get about one third of the people enthralled with you, one third will hate you and fight you, and and the rest will straight up ignore you. My status updates seem to follow that when I am negative, and when I am witty and intelligent or supportive and kind I get nearly a sixth of the responses.

It pays to be an ass, if your preferred payment is attention. Coincidentally, (and NOT ironically, people ought to learn dey english) this is exactly the method used to win the midterms for the Republicans. They just went and threw a tantrum and would not do anything constructive. They dealt in negativity and a pompous level of insanity previously reserved for the street corner prophets adorned in sandwich-board. These opinion makers and policy procrastinators created a discourse of doom and an attitude of the bully-victim. In reality these people were acting out to get attention and it worked well. A third of the population (the Democrats) were outraged, a third (the Republicans) were enthralled with them, and a third (moderates and independents) just got apathetic.

Just like on Facebook when I made a ton of very negative comments about all the people who were friends that not in support of my approved agenda for America.

my comments received skyrocketed via this same ratio. I received attention both positive and negative for my actions. A lesson any boy in the sixth grade already knows, relearned thanks to the internet. A class clown is popular, hated, and ignored by different groups of the micro-society around them. This is no different for society on the whole, whether it be the society of Facebook, Twitter, Fox News watchers, or voters. The negative discourse always garners more attention.