I thought I should explain my current Twitter background which looks a bit like this:
You might have read that teens don't use Twitter. I wonder if that has contributed to the commodification of personality on Twitter. We have become quite good at 'branding ourselves', creating Twitter backgrounds with bios, Twitter landing pages, and for a while there it felt like ever second Twitter avatar was like a smiling passport photo.
So, I thought I might just leave my background blank-ish, for the moment. Creating the 'perfect' personal online brand might be helpful to certain agendas at a particular time. I'm not saying that it's wrong to have a Twitter background, landing page or smiling avatar. I've done it myself. But...just thinkin' ....do you risk losing your ability to find new ways to express yourself or innovate in a quest to create an effective, popular digital footprint? What else could you do with a Twitter background, apart from showcasing the best of *you* (which in turn, might actually showcase the best of *you* more than a neat bio ever could)?
Oh. I just googled "commodfication of personality", in case there was anything interesting and came across an interview with Rick Moody (The Ice Storm) published today. At one point the interviewer Ryan Boudinot asks "Have we gotten to a point where the commodification of personality has become so overbearing that it's impossible for us to separate self-promotion from expression?"
Your thoughts?