All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.”
— Chuck Palahniuk
I’ve never met Chuck Palahniuk, but knowing what I know of what he writes and how he writes it, I would hazard a guess that if he ever met @chuckpalahniuk he would either stomp all over his face or flee the room crying tears of boredom. Because the Chuck Palahniuk universe as I know it is a pitched battle between the Tyler Durdens of the world and the forces of ennui, and there simply is no place for being boring.
From all appearances, @chuckpalahniuk is boring, uncommunicative, and somewhat self-centered. He isn’t really interested in what other people have to say (judging from the total of 12 people he is currently following) and his sporadic communication with the legions of people that are following him all center around promotional offers and tour dates and occasional — in his words — shameless blog plugs.
Gratuitous webmaster plug. Check out my new blog! “How To Make A Film In A Week”: http://tinyurl.com/dle4fo3:17 AM Apr 28th from web
I don’t mean to pick on @chuckpalahniuk, I’m certainly a fan of his alter ego’s writing. I’m singling him out because he represents exactly how not to use this amorphous communication vehicle we call twitter. Namely…
It has to be you. Turns out @chuckpalahniuk is something of an amalgamation, a mythical creature with the name and likeness of the best-selling author but the voice of his webmaster Dennis. Quite simply, if you’re having your webmaster tweet, you shouldn’t be on twitter at all. Twitter is a place to be you, to talk like you, and to listen like you. If you’re not being you, people will sniff you out and they will lose interest quickly, as in “who invited the sociopathic self-promoting android to the dinner party?” Particularly if you ARE an inherently interesting person — like I assume Chuck Palahniuk to be — with a distinct and recognizable voice and humor. All the more obvious when it doesn’t sound like you. And it doesn’t sound like Chuck. It sounds like Dennis. Or more accurately, it sounds like Dennis begrudgingly tweeting because someone decided Chuck “should have a twitter presence.”
People do not follow you for a list of promotional updates. If I want promotional updates, I’ll opt into an email list or an SMS promotion. I follow @chuckpalahniuk because I want to know that Chuck Palahniuk had runny eggs for breakfast and he’s tired of hearing about the Swine Flu. I don’t care that Chuck is appearing at the Strand on May 6th at 6:30 PM — or maybe I do, but its not ALL I care about — I want to know details. I want to know if he thinks the Strand is as gross, musty, and utterly unnavigable as I do — in other words, I want to build a conversational relationship. Which is extremely easy to do. Contrary to what Dennis might think.
There is no “us and them.” Recently a follower of @chuckpalahniuk questioned whether Chuck would placate the masses by actually speaking to them himself. @chuckpalahniuks response:
@jamesgardiner I’m working on it, but he’s a busy guy. For now, this is the best you’re gonna get.
Take that, all you faceless fans out there. To use a facebook analogy — and to continue the gratuitous repetition of the letter f — Followers are neither fans nor friends. They land somewhere squarely in the middle. They certainly don’t expect you to share childhood photos, but they do expect a conversation that is more than a one-way communication from ruler to subject. And they certainly don’t want to be talked down to. Especially not by Dennis. Yeah, I’m busy too, Dennis. So is @RealHughJackman and @THE_REAL_SHAQ, both of whom tweet regularly — as themselves.
But Chuck, even if by some miracle you are busier than Shaq, tweeting is easy! You can tweet from your phone in 10 seconds. You can tweet from the cab on your way over to the Strand… something to the effect of:
in cab, on way to reading at Strand.
There’s simply no way you’re too busy to tweet. Which makes me think you probably aren’t that interested in twitter. Because only people who are actually interested in twitter bother to write updates about being in cabs on the way to readings. And if you’re not that interested in twitter, then you probably shouldn’t be on it…
I’ll end with a simple request to the real Chuck Palahniuk. If the Chuck Palahniuk you want the world to see and hear and engage with is indeed best exemplified in the tweets of @chuckpalahniuk, then by all means keep doing what you’re doing. But upon review, if you realize that @chuckpalahniuk is in fact a boring impostor, a man with your name and likeness but who does things you would never do and says things that you would never say… then maybe you should let us have the real Chuck for a while.
In other words, don’t be boring.
– @brooklynjosh
Author’s note: As I write this, @chuckpalahniuk has 228,584 followers on Twitter, and I have 92. So that fact alone might trump any feeble points I have made here.
Posted by schreiwire 
Posted by schreiwire 
Posted by schreiwire 
