“I ain’t got time to stand around here and discuss trivial trivialities!”

I admit, I don’t Twitter.  I do Facebook and I’ve thought about MySpacing, but Twitter…I guess I just don’t see the point.  For one thing, my life isn’t exciting enough to chronicle in short, 140-character bursts.  I mean, what am I gonna say?  “I’m putting together the supper menu.  Hamburger Helper it is!” or “My cat took a dump in the sandbox and it’s smelling up the laundry room.” or “My toenails grow too slow.  I wonder if that fungus has anything to do with it?”

Okay, maybe I’m sharing too much with you people.

But I guess that’s part of my point…why would I want to stay hyper-connected to my friends?  Why would they want to stay hyper-connected to me?  Do I have people in my life who care that much?  I don’t think even I care that much.  I’m boring!  (Dawn, however, is not.  Of course she’s not.  She’s awesome!)

But to get to my point (and I do have one), it amazes me how people get on these sites and think that because they are “friends” with a celeb, they are somehow connecting with them and leave them gushy little notes telling how the “thx 4 the add” blurb totally brightened their day.  Surely anyone over the age of fifteen realizes that what you see isn’t always what you get when it comes to celeb marketing?  Lily Allen and Perez notwithstanding, I figured out a long time ago that many (not all…yeah, I’m talkin’ to you, Ashton) celebs who have these sort of social networking pages don’t maintain them themselves, and I guess I was right:

The rapper 50 Cent is among the legion of stars who have recently embraced Twitter to reach fans who crave near-continuous access to their lives and thoughts. On March 1, he shared this insight with the more than 200,000 people who follow him: “My ambition leads me through a tunnel that never ends.”

Those were 50 Cent’s words, but it was not exactly him tweeting. Rather, it was Chris Romero, known as Broadway, the director of the rapper’s Web empire, who typed in those words after reading them in an interview.

“He doesn’t actually use Twitter,” Mr. Romero said of 50 Cent, whose real name is Curtis Jackson III, “but the energy of it is all him.” [...]

[S]omeone has to do all that writing, even if each entry is barely a sentence long. In many cases, celebrities and their handlers have turned to outside writers — ghost Twitterers, if you will — who keep fans updated on the latest twists and turns, often in the star’s own voice.

Because Twitter is seen as an intimate link between celebrities and their fans, many performers are not willing to divulge the help they use to put their thoughts into cyberspace.

Britney Spears recently advertised for someone to help, among other things, create content for Twitter and Facebook. Kanye West recently told New York magazine that he has hired two people to update his blog. “It’s just like how a designer would work,” he said.

It is not only celebrities who are forced to look to a team to produce real-time commentary on daily activities; politicians like Ron Paul have assigned staff members to create Twitter posts and Facebook personas. Candidate Barack Obama, as well as President Obama, has a social-networking team to keep his Twitter feed tweeting.

The famous, of course, have turned to ghostwriters for autobiographies and other acts of self-aggrandizement. But the idea of having someone else write continual updates of one’s daily life seems slightly absurd.

Yes, I can see that a celeb needs marketing; these sorts of social networking sites plays right into that because they are easy and hip ways of reaching the unwashed masses.  Plus, it is a great way for a star to get their ego stroked in real-time, for I would guess that more people probably Twitter or MySpace than buy tickets to concerts or fan magazines.  But I’m gratified to see that I’m not the only one who finds the whole idea of ghost-Twitterers kind of stupid.  I guess if you don’t look at someone as a person but rather as a commodity…uh…yeah, it still seems kind of stupid:

Many online commentators are appalled at the practice of enlisting ghost Twitterers, but Joseph Nejman, a former consultant to Ms. Spears who helped conceive her Web strategy, said there was a more than a whiff of hypocrisy among critics.

“It’s O.K. to tweet for a brand,” he said, remarking how common it is for companies to have Twitter accounts, “but not O.K. for a celebrity. But the truth is, they are a brand. What they are to the public is not always what they are behind the curtain. If the manager knows that better than the star, then they should do it.”

In the last couple of months, the Britney Spears Twitter stream has become a model of transparency. Where the feed once seemed that it was all written personally by Ms. Spears — even the blatantly promotional items about a new album — lately it can read like a group blog, with some posts signed “Britney,” some signed by “Adam Leber, manager” and others by “Lauren.” That would be Lauren Kozak, social-media director of britneyspears.com. (Ms. Spears’s management team declined to be interviewed for this article.)

However, it does seem that there are a few people who can manage to have thoughts of their own:

The basketball star Shaquille O’Neal, for example, is a prolific Twitterer on his account — The Real Shaq — where he shares personal news, jokes and occasional trash talking about opponents with nearly 430,000 followers.

“If I am going to speak, it will come from me,” he said, adding that the technology allows him to bypass the media to speak directly to the fans.

As for the temptation to rely on a team to supply his words, he said: “It’s 140 characters. It’s so few characters. If you need a ghostwriter for that, I feel sorry for you.” [emphasis mine]

Athletes seem to be purists. Lance Armstrong, only hours after breaking his right collar bone, tweeted about it, using his left hand. Charlie Villanueva, a forward for the Milwaukee Bucks, tweeted at halftime from the locker room on March 15 about how “I gotta step up.” (His coach, Scott Skiles, was not pleased with his diversion, but the Bucks did win.)

I agree with Shaq on something.  What is the world coming to?

However, I don’t see why I am surprised, especially in light of the news this week that Perez Hilton may not be writing his own blog any more, but rather relying on the help of ghostwriters to do his scribbling for him.  And everybody knows that back in the day before the interwebs, the big movie stars used to have a whole staff of people who did things like reply to fan letters and sign their “autographs” to black-and-white glossies.

But this isn’t signing a stack of photographs…this is taking a few minutes out of your day to log in and post a silly little comment on your life.  You don’t even have to be in front of a computer; you can do it on your PDA while you are in the back of a limo being chauffeured to your next plush hotel.  If you’re such a big star that you’ve got to delegate a team of writers to Twitter for you, then there’s a bigger problem in your life, dude.  I guess it’s yet another way that They are different than We…We have to carve a few minutes out of our day to post something trivial, while They can just wave their little finger and get a minion to post their trivial trivialities and possibly make them sound interesting to boot.  Hey, whatever fills their instant gratification jones.

But I promise you this…if you ever see anything on here with the initial “k” attached to it, that’s me.  I do my own writing…and my own everything else, too.  I wonder if I can get someone to ghost-cook and ghost-clean and ghost-laundry for me?

(yes, I know the Barney photo doesn’t match the caption, wrong episode, but it’s a great picture nonetheless!)

Source: k

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