Since I wrote about the Dynamics of Followship, asking what exactly we’re trying to accomplish in getting more and more followers, I’ve continued to examine this question. Today, while talking with someone about the futility of follower-hunting, a new descriptor crossed my mind. I even uttered it.

We are turning into follower collectors. Maybe we are there already.

What do I mean by this? I mean first that we are deriving self-worth, or assigning success based on that number next to our [insert social media channel here] number of followers–or deceiving ourselves into believing that this number ascribes such a value. We are simply going about, collecting followers like we would baseball cards, or comic books, or stamps, or stuff we hoard in the garage and whatever closet we can commandeer for the purpose, without ever really planning to see that card, or read that comic book, or use that stamp, nor any of the other stuff we hoard.

It’s just there, collected, with no real relationship or meaning other than the number. Hurray for us. We got it. In our neat little pile.

Heck, even some people looking over our “platform” will ascribe value to it. What? You call yourself an author? And you don’t have more than five thousand followers? Well, then. I won’t touch your work. It must not be marketable.

Never mind considerations of whether those followers are truly fans, or whether they share your ideals and values, or whether they care one wit about your world view and the way you express it. No, man. Show us the number. If you don’t have a big enough collection, get to work and come back to us when your storage unit is packed to the gills.

Even back when we collected baseball cards or comic books, we had some notion of quality: which items we wanted to collect over others. But now, even that’s gone. We want numbers. Higher and higher counts. We only care about stuffing the box, and the next one, and the one we will stack on top of that.

Here’s the core question that bothers me most when I start falling into follower-collector mode: are my efforts to follow others and get followed taking me away from following my heart? What about me and who I am do I give away when I place “followship” for popularity and fame’s sake above what matters–what ought to matter most?[tweetthis]Are my efforts to follow others and get followed taking me away from following my heart?[/tweetthis]

So… are you a follower collector? How is that working out for you? What meaningful conversations and interactions are you having with your 22.3K followers–the ones you bought for your collection, excuse me, attracted and engaged? What about them? How do they view you? Do they care about you, your ideas, and your work? Or do they sit there, inside their mint condition preserver sealed bag, inanimate, inert, and irrelevant?