Usually not one to spend too much time fretting over Klout scores and blog rankings (at least not any more), I suddenly found myself jumping at the opportunity to sign up to The Sunday Times Social List this afternoon, just to see if it would tell me that I’m influential in the field of marital relations, or something else suitability inaccurate and false.
The Sunday Times Social List is a bit like the Times Rich List but instead of measuring your monetary value it measures your worth based on your social networking activity. After tapping in my Twitter and Facebook details I discovered that I am a Linchpin, which means I have a rare ability to bring people together. That’s nice.
It didn’t tell me a great deal more but did say that one way I could improve my rank, if I so wished, was to ‘upload outrageous pics to attract more comments and points’. That seemed straight-forward enough so I set to work.
Then while digging out photos from my long-forgotten university days when I was young, naïve with very big hair and bushy eye-brows and an inability, it seems, to sensibly judge how much is too much on a night out, it occurred to me that there were benefits to a life without social-networking.
Back in the olden days of 1992, there was no-one there to capture you on a night out and tag you on Facebook before you’ve had a chance to wake up from a hangover. There was, thankfully, no twitter for iphone from which you could tweet your every move whether it was advisable to do so or not. In fact there were no mobiles phones at all.
How very primitive that some of us had to stand outside telephone boxes with a handful of ten pence coins if we wanted to make contact with home. Or with anywhere in fact. But what a huge relief that what happened back then stayed back then and couldn’t be shared with the whole world online.
So I’m happy to remain a Linchpin. Some of us have benefited hugely from a lack of social networking at certain times in our lives. So I’ll pass on the opportunity to attract more comments and posts through outrageous pics and focus my attention on The Rich List instead, which seems a far more sensible idea all things considered.
