Comments on: Twitter: celebrity and comedy

By: Linda

Linda — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 11:09:51 +0000

Hi Louise,
Thank you for your help in editing this and for blogging about it. I’m delighted to say that submissions are already rolling in, so that’s great news.
There are things I need specific help with and hope to keep up the tweeting blitz to let people know about what’s happening and crucially, how they can help. The collaboration aspect could be really interesting.
But I have to tell you Missus that I am a big fan of celebs on Twitter, these people are hugely popular entertainers, I talk about them at work, watch their TV programmes and admire their success in some cases, to follow them on Twitter is an added bonus.

There are plenty of ‘non’ celebs who spend their time on Twitter laregly for self promotion through publishing links to sometimes pretty stale pieces they have written etc – and they don’t always find time to reply to those who get in touch.

Why should celebs be any different? The ones I follow are entertainers by trade – why should they be judged any different to any other industry?

By: louise

louise — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 20:59:49 +0000

Thanks for your comments, Bill. Definitely more food for thought there. Funnily enough, someone described me earlier today as (something along the lines of) “one of the most important media people in the UK Twitter sphere” which made me burst out laughing as people like Charles Arthur and Jemima Kiss are far more prominent journalists than I’ll probably ever be. Clearly I spend too much time on Twitter though. And if that’s the case, I might as well harness what power I have for the greater good, by urging people to do their bit for Linda Jones’ project to raise hard cash for Red Nose Day.

By: Bill

Bill — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 20:48:57 +0000

I’ve cut my major sleb followage down to Fry, who is so sweet and interesting, and makes such a genuine effort to interact, that I’d feel like a bastard ignoring him. I’ve toyed with Ross, Schofield et al., but although they come across as decent people they’re a lot less interesting than plenty of unknowns I’d like to follow.

There are a few other borderline slebs I follow for various reasons: Charlie Brooker because his tweets are funny, and a few others that I actually know through my work.

Third rung contains folks like Jemima Kiss, Charles Arthur and Bill Thompson who are prominent in media circles. I follow them – and tweet now and then – but although they are major league Twitterers you couldn’t call them proper celebrities (sorry, chaps.)

I do think it’s interesting that Twitter is becoming so hierarchical. Many people seem to spend all their time twatronising or twellating other users, depending where on the social scale they perceive themselves to be. I can understand the twellatio, too – when you’ve got the opportunity to talk directly to someone who is (gasp!) famous there’s a huge urge to interact. It’s like, ‘NOTICE ME!’ A form of self-validation, I guess. It’ll be interesting to see if social media ultimately chips away at the pedestal we put famous people on.

Oddly, I do find a very small, but increasing, number of people twellating *me*. That’s something of a surprise, since if you composed a list of everyone in the UK media in order of famousness I’d probably be in the bottom three, just below the work experience kid in the Daily Star mailroom. What I want to do with these twellators is follow them all – i.e., treat them as my equals, show them that Twitter is a community of equals and not a hierarchy. But even with TweetDeck that’s impractical, so I find myself turning into one of the twatronising self-fanciers I affect not to like.

I wonder if Twitter would be better if users’ follower numbers were not public?