The act of creating lists may result in a dual class of Twitizen – Those who are on lists of influential people and those who are not. To some extent lists may freeze the status quo of power structures within Twitter as they exist today, Give those with influence even more, and may make it much harder for new users to be discovered which may hinder engagement by the long tale of users
This post discusses what we learned about power dynamics in social media as a result of Unfollow Ashton Kutcher Day. In summary, Ashton Kutcher was partly right — the little guy does have a voice, no matter how many followers they may have. And this voice has the potential to engage and influence others to take action. It is just that the voices of a “popular few” have much greater reach.
The fact that we were unsuccessful does not mean that an individual with relatively little influence cannot generate a social media groundswell that could have viral impact on a mass scale but rather that this attempt did not succeed in achieving its stated goal.
This was an imperfect experiment but nonetheless I believe we succeeded in demonstrating both the amazing democratizing effect of social media, as well as, its inherent power imbalances.
1 million twitter followers means a shift of power balances from corporate media to individuals and denotes a coming of age of social media. With that comes new concerns of power imbalances.