April 25, 2009, marks the birth of my Twitter account: nikkijagerman. It’s the only social network I’m a part of, and it’s reminding me why I hate MySpace and Facebook. There’s no real point to it and it makes ordinary people think they’re celebrities. Since it’s sort of new in comparison to the other social networks, no one really has one except for every television personality.
Those whose faces appear regularly on the covers of tabloids have the most followers. For example, Ashton Kutcher has 1,617,207 people following his tweets. Heidi Montag, of reality television fame, updates her page with cringers such as, “i love my husband @spencerpratt!!!!!” to her remarkable 316,440 followers, while Lauren Conrad only has 90,491 followers. Ouch.
Most of their updates have just about no entertainment value and lead me to wonder why they decided to broadcast things like their grocery list.
The true gems are the comedians ““ such as Rainn Wilson ““ who understand that commentary is more amusing than the original action itself.
For example, Wilson posted updates that said, “Chorizo fever? #namethatflu Wait, that’s not right…” and “I still like “˜hamthrax’ in response to a feed that asks its followers to cleverly rename the swine flu.
TMI plagues the site. Updates every half-hour are too much. I’ve seen feeds where people post scores throughout a game. And it’s not even professional sports either; it was the stats on a game of beer pong.
However, there are some Twitter gems that make all the vacuous tweets worth it. Seeing one of your friends post a FML-worthy story or an odd observation make up for all the boring “going to bed. goodnight, twitter!” updates.
It seems like news organizations, businesses, and political and social analysts would be good profiles to follow. “Seems” being the operative word. Limiting a news story to 140 characters lets you know that you have no idea what’s going on. Usually they end in a link to the full story, so really it would make more sense to just go to the news organization’s Web site in the first place.
Upon finding silver fox Anderson Cooper on Twitter, I immediately clicked “Follow,” thinking I would get the Dina Lohan-hating Cooper mixed with “The Situation Room” Cooper.
Much to my dismay, most of his posts are links to his blog and news stories. I wanted the scoop on his very private love life and stories about weird things that happened at a dinner party with various world leaders. I would love for him to write about if Nicolas Sarkozy pinched Sasha Obama’s nose after having put peas up there in a “got your nose” joke gone awry. Instead, he produces updates such as, “Can a video game help us fight the swine flu ““ and other pandemics?” No, Andy. It can’t.
Twitter serves as a sort of decent news feed. The only part that makes it decent at all is that each user is able to customize who and what they follow.
Music lovers can follow their favorite artists, fashion savants can follow taste-makers, and idiots follow Diddy.
Those who use Twitter to have people actually “follow” them, as in update their location and activity often enough for someone to actually be able to follow (stalk) them, are freaks. It’s an abuse of technology. It’s better used as a venue for commentary. Like your own little VH1’s “I Love Weird Things That Happened To Me Today,” and not a human tracking device.
If you need the minute-by-minute updates on Jagerman, e-mail her at njagerman@media.ucla.edu.