July 7th, 2008
The Selfish Meme and other stories of bad Twitiquette
I never thought this would happen, but I was duped by the Richard Dawkins-but-not-really-Richard Dawkins caper of recent Twitterfame. Well, I’m not that surprised, actually. It was a classic case of wish fulfilment: I wanted the great man to be ‘down with the kids’ so badly, I was too willing to ignore my suspicions that Dawkins wouldn’t a) have the time to document his thoughts and activities via Twitter, b) actually bother responding to replies to his updates and c) submit to Twitter’s 140-character constraints on his thinking. I signed up to follow him, then within a few messages, realised he was a fraud. So I had to block him, the only form of retaliation I had in my arsenal 
But I was duped, and little stung when I realised. Fake Richard Dawkins has since been chastised and his followers dwindled to a few clueless sheep; however, I’m sure it won’t be long before a few more fake celebs begin to send status updates from their fake lives. Luke Hardiman has already kindly posted a few well known parodies. Hell, there’s even a blog purporting to be Twitter, updating us as to its (unstable) status.
I won’t go into the details of Twitterquette here as I had intended to at first, because Scoble already has and inspired a lively debate in his original thread. I also found this video contribution from a particularly articulate youngster (who knew there were such people around) which I thought deserved a mention. I have a great admiration for people such as this who can open up their thoughts via webcam for the world to see and hear - after all, it’s much easier to write your thoughts than to rap off the top of your head about these things.
For me the first and only true commandment of Twitter, and any form of self-publishing for that matter, is to be honest about the self that’s publishing. Parodies are fine, even on Twitter (I used to love the Stephen Colbert updates) - but impersonation for the sake of furthering your own ideas is the Selfish Meme embodied.