I am not a number

So, Ashton Kutcher and CNN have decided to compete for followers.  Am I the only person who's offended by the fact that two of the largest names on twitter have decided to have a pissing contest and use the number of people who want to hear what they have to say as a marker?

It can be difficult enough to explain twitter to some people (see my last post about this) and this concept of followers and following's purely as a scoreboard just rankles me.  As I said in that last post, twitter is a truly social concept.  It depends on people saying something interesting or fun as well as the retweet and the @reply.  Those numbers, whether they be 1, 100 or 1 million aren't numbers, each and every one of them is a person and each and every one deserves respect.

I'll admit, I started following @StephenFry when I came onto twitter, and I still do.  Not because I expect him to notice me or even be interested in a word I have to say, but because I'm interested in what he has to say.  I also follow @DaveGorman and completely agree with him about people who follow thousands of others.

But the thing is that I'm just so annoyed by this that I can't even explain why.  This competition just seems to have cheapened twitter, just as it starts to come of age.  So I ask you, are you a number, or are you a free (wo)man?

(Oh, and I know it's an awful attempt - I'm not a graphic designer or artist or anything, and it was all done in Paint, but if you want a copy of the Logo head over to Flickr.)