The Twitter Effect (Supp.Post 2)

I recently joined the dark side and created a Twitter account. I did so because I was curious about how it works and because a few organizations I am involved with are using the site as a communication device. While I have not yet "tweeted" anything myself, I follow a few users--mainly celebrities. After being on the site for about a week, i still can't figure out why twitter is such a big deal. Most of the famous people tweet about something they are involved with, linking to pictures or videos of projects. But others will just describe their day, for example many stars in New York City spent most of the end of this past week tweeted about the horrible snowstorm. What i can't help but wonder is why do we care? Twitter seems to be the most extreme form of celebrity stalking--now we can now what a star is up to from the minute they wake up to when they go to sleep. But no one seems to be saying anything of relevance. Basically what twitter does is show us the human, normal side of celebrities--we are now all on the same page because we can use the same electronic device to communicate and share news about ourselves.

The site also seems contradictory for so many celebrities because many of them spend significant amounts of time complaining about all of the attention put on their personal lives. But if you want your personal life to remain private, why are you advertising everything you do to the entire world (in 140 characters or less)? Certain stars, such as Ellen DeGeneres or Ryan Seacrest seem to keep their twitters professional, promoting all of their various projects they are involved in, but many others (the Kardashians, the stars of "Glee", etc.) are merely tweeting about what they are doing at the current time. In revealing these facts about themselves, the celebrities are essentially giving people the go ahead to be curious about their personal lives, thus giving them no right to complain when things get out of control. We are now able to interact with them in a very direct way and thus the feeling that we "know" a celebrity becomes even greater. It seems like through twitters, stars show us their "true" selves, but on the other side, twitter is just a greater way of reinforcing their star persona to all of their followers.