Social Media Barrage

January 30, 2012 § Leave a comment

On Friday, Al Jazeera posted a video newsclip about “South Korea’s Pop Wave.” I saw it tweeted from their Twitter account, which I follow, and clicked because it piqued my interest. Hmm, I thought. K-pop is ostensibly gaining exposure in America, and now Al Jazeera is reporting on it? Interesting. I got distracted by other things on Twitter before having a chance to get back to the video, but when I did, I realized that I didn’t feel like watching it anymore. As a [waning] K-pop fan, I don’t need some out-of-touch reporter telling me what to think of the industry. [Apparently I’m still afflicted with sentiments of a teenager at times.]

However, good old AJ just wouldn’t let it rest. Over the past few days, I have seen this story tweeted countless times from the one account — I’ve been following them for some time now, and I guess it just dawned on me that their approach to social media is to highlight stories over and over again like a desperate child with Tourette syndrome trying to be noticed, though it’s especially bad with this story. I mean, sometimes they even tweet the same story twice in a row for no apparent reason. What’s the point? What’s the strategy here? Who manages this account, a horde of robot monkeys?

Was it because the death count rose to more than “dozens”?

Al Jazeera tweets a lot, which not only oversaturates followers’ feeds but also trains followers to ignore the majority of them. I had never paid that much attention before because none of their articles quite caught my eye like the unexpected phrase “K-pop.” And you know what, maybe they’re onto something, for the more controversial of their K-pop tweets [AKA the ones that mention corruption or a “dark side”] get plenty of retweets. In any case, I decided to document Al Jazeera’s gauche behavior as a cautionary tale. I even replied to one of their tweets with a hesitant cease-and-desist, which did absolutely nothing. [Their account never replies to followers anyway.] If you would like to argue in their favor, I’d like to hear it!

These are in chronological order, from the first innocuous tweet to the most recent one, which I believe isn’t the last of them…