Supplemental Post #3 - Celebrity Twitter

I'm constantly surprised at how interested much people (including myself)are obsessed with celebrity. I recently wrote a paper about Twitter, and found that a lot of my work revolved around celebrities' uses of the micro-blogging service that was developed as an innovative information network and means of helping individuals keep in contact with each other but has gone on to do that and so much more in the few years since its initial 2006 launch-- including celebrity tweets are just the beginning. Twitter is how you found out Michael Jackson died, why Avatar was the movie you needed to see, and that Kim Kardashian got a bad sunburn. Maybe it is an important tool in spreading celebrity news (like Jackson's death), but does everyone really need to see the picture Kardashian tweeted when she fell asleep sunbathing? Absolutely not, but enough people (including me) cared to a certain extent that we saw it. Moreso than ever, the everyday happenings of celebrities' lives are available to the general public. You don't even need to have a Twitter account to have an inside view. Search almost anything on google and Twitter posts come up as results; msn.com (and I'm sure several other homepages) have a daily Twitter trend report; there are even websites like these: http://www.celebritytweet.com/: a one-stop shop for celebrity Twitter updates. I'm amazed at how much we care about celebrities in our culture, and though we have studied what makes a star and why stars are important this entire semester, it still baffles me how much I continue to care.