Once upon a time there was an honest, courageous and strong Superhero. While the rest of the city was asleep, our Superhero fought for what was right - protecting the weak, rescuing the fallen, punishing wrongdoers wherever they chose to do wrong. He was a force of nature in an anonymous mask and snug, though quite functional thank-you-very-much, armour.
While on patrol our Superhero used Twitter to keep in touch with his super-fans; all 1.2 million of them. For a few hours last week, after a particularly juicy encounter with Dr. Kelp™ he was a trending topic in his local area; this pleased him. His personal brand was growing in strength every day.
By day and by necessity, our Superhero wasn’t so super at all; he would wake, eat cereal, drink tea, travel to work. Work involved thinking laterally, teaming effectively - aligning personal and professional motivations; really living the brand, really living it. Like all of his colleagues, he sometimes found work frustrating and arbitrary. Unlike his colleagues he sometimes had to resist turning this frustration into fiery vengeance across both time and space.
At weekends our Superhero would blog using his not-so-super personality. Themes included the quirky hum-drum of every day life, things at work that don’t add up, hopes for the future, local restaurants worth investigating. He liked to think his blog was personal enough to be interesting and insightful, but not personal enough to be creepy or painful. He was careful to avoid sharing information of use to arch-criminals hell-bent on linking his super and not-so-super identities, pinpointing his weaknesses, vapourising him with some manner of death-ray.
Life was busy, but he used Facebook to maintain awareness of what friends and family were up to; occasionally liking things that he wanted to be seen to like, or commenting on thing he wanted to be seen to comment on. Sometimes he got time to grab a beer, chill out with friends in-person; even hit on girls. His mother insisted on calling him Thomas; even on Facebook. He knew that un-friending her would cause more problems than it was worth.
Some nights, our Superhero was sure that nothing could possibly go wrong, that he was at the peak of his (some might say “awesome”) super-powers. Nights where he just believed, you know? These were usually the nights when he would get his ass kicked - like that time Dr. Kelp™ hit him over the head with a telegraph pole.
He rarely discussed this type of incident on Twitter. Super-fans do not need to hear about super-ass-whooping in real time.
Blogging about it, even blogging around it substituting out on patrol for “out walking my dog”, Dr Kelp™ for “some random jerk” and telegraph pole for “tennis racket”, just wouldn’t fit with the blog’s breezy tone.
Speaking about it with work colleagues was out of the question for their lives would be put in mortal danger.
Facebook, well - he’d need to carefully check those privacy settings yet again, and would only be able to say that he’d had a “rough night on the town”.
Sometimes he wondered if this was all such a good idea in the long-run.
