Ashton Kutcher and Larry Tales from the Crypt King recently competed to see who was the most worthy of being waterboarded who could generate the largest following on Twitter. I won’t spoil the ignominious ending by telling you who won, in case you’re comfortable under your rock, but it wasn’t Larry King.

The contest – aside from serving as a not-too-subtle reminder that Western civilization is decaying more rapidly than I’d originally thought, revealed something about the nature of Twitter: this medium, which is supposedly about participating in conversations, runs the risk of being converted to just another broadcast marketing medium. As of today, Ashton Kutcher has over 2 million followers. CNN has 1.7 million followers. Do you think Ashton and CNN are participating in 3.7 million conversations? Between the two of them, they follow 175 people. By my count, that’s 175 conversations, not 3.7 million. They are broadcasting.

I don’t have any problem with people who have exponentially more followers than people they follow (I think a viable case for not liking Ashton Kutcher can be made without including his Twitter habits). After all, they are in the business of broadcasting.

While celebrities and media outlets may be excused for using the medium however they damn well please, thank you very much, we should not be so lenient with people who claim to be social pundits and new media experts. One of the most admired people in the social media sphere follows more than 7,300 people. SEVEN THOUSAND PEOPLE. I don’t know seven thousand people. I daresay, in the sum total of my entire 35 years of existence, I’ve not even met seven thousand people. How conversational can you be when SEVEN THOUSAND PEOPLE are talking at the same time?

You can’t be.

Programs like Tweetlater enable Twitterers to quickly build a seemingly impressive list of friends by automatically following everyone who follows you. Twollow searches for keywords you select and automatically follows people who use them – pick the right words and you can have an enormous list of people you follow. If many of these people use programs like Tweetlater to autofollow (and presumably they do)…. you do the math.

Artificially-inflated Twitter numbers facilitated by programs like these are starting to dominate the Twitterverse. Worse, this kind of automation suggests Twitter is reaching a sort of tipping point, where the usage of the medium is switching from one-to-one to one-to-many. Automation is a corrosive force in social media.