Daily Times

A long time ago, the assessment of one’s net worth was not a cumbersome process at all. All you had to do was calculate the value of livestock in your possession, as it was the most reliable marker of wealth in those days. Other assets such as gold coins, land ownership, slaves (both male and female) and the number of male heirs (only) were also computed in the equation. But the propensity of farm animals to multiply, their milk production and easy availability to be consumed as food made them the most dependable resource. Hence, the higher the number of cattle in one’s farm, the richer one was, and was respected in the tribe accordingly.

Thousands of years later today, obviously, counting of cattle is not the yardstick anymore to estimate one’s net worth. We live in an age of complex financial products where the wealth of an individual exists in legal tenders, mortgage-based securities and stock options. Adding them together to appraise their real value indeed needs complicated mathematical formulae nowadays; however, being tangible like farm animals, they still are not nearly as difficult to calculate when compared to the intangible assets. Intangible assets include trademarks, copyrights, goodwill, patents and of course, one’s Twitter following (which may worth millions of dollars in itself). Simply put, it means that the number of your admirers on that website influence how high your voice is going to be heard, how vast it will cast its influence, how deep its echo will resonate and in the end, it will also determine how big will be your next paycheck.

Our confusion about the idea of net worth has exacerbated only because of a 36-year-old American entrepreneur and businessman, Jack Dorsey, who as a student of the New York University created the website and change the whole world by just letting people talk to their group of friends. In Dorsey’s own words, he named the project as ‘twitter’ because the definition was “a short burst of inconsequential information”, and “chirps from birds”. And that is exactly what the product was. Dorsey’s concept was simple. He wanted to replace the mobile version of the short messaging system (SMS) with a website, where friends can freely send back and forth short messages of up to 140 letters to each other.

Dorsey witnessed exponential growth of his website in just a few years. Tweets skyrocketed from 400,000 messages per quarter in 2007 to 100 million per quarter in 2008, and they have continued to soar every day. So was the case of its followers that has crossed the 500 million limit now; they transmit 340 million tweets per day. It has become one of the ten most visited websites in the world, and has almost 1.6 billion daily searches.

This American entrepreneur also noticed that his ‘blue bird’ completely changed the face of North Africa in a matter of months when ‘she’ took notice of Muhammad Bouazizi of Tunisia self-immolating himself in December 2010. By taking down thwo ruthless dictatorial regimes of Egypt and Tunisia in 2011-12, it has proved its virulence way beyond Sahara in the Middle East and the Arabian Peninsula. Not unexpectedly, she was also particularly popular in Iran, and even tried to flex her mighty muscles after the presidential elections of 2009 during the street protests, but the regime sensed its power and blocked social media on the internet. Without the imaginative and innovative skills of twitter, demonstrations did not last long and the ‘Man of God’ continues to be the president of Iran.

Contrary to its role in the Arab Spring, social media was unable to bring a revolution in Pakistan. Many people who actively tweet and have a large following, were genuinely disappointed as we turned out to be far more resistant to change than our Middle Eastern counterparts. Disenchanted by people’s response, as some genuine (internet-based) Pakistani revolutionaries missed a possible role in the administration during transition, they started using obscenities (you know who I am talking about) on media. Despite our political inefficiencies, we have done very well in reaping the personal benefits from social networking. We have successfully converted our twitter following as a marker of our personal wealth, both tangible and intangible, that can easily be added to our net worth for better financial prospects in future. Consequently, some reformers keenly count their fans regularly and get upset if the number drops more than three in a day! Moreover, not only the quantity, but to them, quality also matters. They gauge the nature of their following and observe if other ‘renowned’ personalities — both local and international — in politics, media, entertainment, administration or the bureaucracy have added them to their list.

Currently, Justin Bieber holds the international crown of having the maximum number of followers with more than 33 million fans, with Lady Gaga as his close competition. On the Pakistani side, former cricket skipper Imran Khan leads us on twitter with his half a million supporters (just 29.8 million short of the young star’s admirers). After Khan, there is a long list of reformers in the top 100 list of Pakistanis with maximum followings on the website. All of them have proudly served the nation well by leading social awareness campaigns, supporting freedom of expression, educating the masses about the rule of law, addressing sensitive issues like religion and women’s rights, while personally enjoying popularity, wealth and eminence all together.

The writer is a US-based freelance columnist. He tweets at @KaamranHashmi and can be reached at skamranhashmi@gmail.com