Participation Is Presence: When You Don’t Post, You Don’t Exist

I had a “lost cell phone” scare today. I’d only been in three places over the course of the day, and yet I’d still managed to lose it somewhere along the way. I felt especially dumb, since one of those three places was my own house, so I’d really only been to two places (not counting a few interstitial spaces, like parking lots).

The precise moment I realized I’d lost my phone was when I went to Twitter something trivial (leaving the dentist’s office), and I found I couldn’t.

Now, I’m not the world’s most prolific Twitter user (I just crossed the 1,000 post threshhold a little while ago), but the inability to post was very unsettling. It reminded me of the time that my car horn broke. (Loose wire.) Sure, you don’t honk your horn all that much (cab drivers excluded), but when you need to honk your horn — an inattentive driver is barreling at you, a kid bolts into traffic — those are times you really need to honk your horn.

If you’re out there on the road without a working horn, you’re not really there in the same way that other drivers are. It’s practically a Schrödinger’s cat kind of situation.

At risk of torturing this silly phone anecdote a bit, it’s kind of the same thing in social media contexts — if you don’t participate — post to Twitter, update your blog, leave a comment, type in a chat — you don’t really exist. (At least, outside of a presence icon or a passive pageview metric.) You’re certainly not at the forefront of anyone’s mind, unless you happen to get yourself up to the point where people look forward to what you have to say, which is essentially fandom. And even that has a shelf life — when you stop updating for a while, you’re training people to think “This person isn’t going to say anything.”

Obviously, this isn’t an online-only thing, but it’s usually more pronounced online because we rarely have non-verbal cues to fall back on (nodding during a face-to-face, clearing your throat on a conference call, etc.) — it’s a lot easier to fade from view online, when your listing in someone’s RSS reader is always dim.

Anyway, it’s another part of the “how often should you post?” dynamic to keep in mind. I guess this is all just a long and boring way to say of course you should only post when you have something to say — you still shouldn’t post just for the sake of posting — but you should also be sure to come up with things to say, to minimize the fading from people’s minds in between posts.

(Oh, I managed to post my utterly insignificant tweet when I got to my computer. And someone found my phone.)

Got something you’d like to share about posting with presence in mind? Please leave a comment below.