There I sat, in the late afternoon of a Saturday, caught in that stupor of semi-boredom during that period of time where it’s too late for homework to even be a consideration but too early for any of your friends to be online on Facebook. Not in the mood to read a book, I restlessly clicked link after link on my computer, scrolling through entire webpages. I read, but I didn’t process. I upvoted, but I didn’t remember. I smiled, but there was no laughter. There were temporary periods when I was able to resurface from that hypnotic trance, but never for too long. Finally, as I started veering closer to the weird side of the internet and started seeing more pictures of cats than was possibly good for me, I came to a sudden, glorious, halt. Conscious of my activity now, I decided to check twitter.
Generally, when I’m on Twitter, it’s on my phone and I’m only really on it to share a bad pun or a life event that’s important to me but probably not to everyone else:
As I casually scrolled through my timeline, I mistakenly clicked on one specific tweet by a man named Scott Synder, who is the author of the currently running Batman comics. I don’t remember the exact wording of the tweet, but it was something to do with him going out for dinner with his wife and a Walter White (of Breaking Bad fame) lookalike standing at the door. The actual content of the tweet is irrelevant, but what does matter is that the tweet itself was an inherently personal tweet. It offered a little window into his life. It was the sort of tweet that I could see myself making (once I get a wife, of course).
What surprised me about this, though, was that this tweet was retweeted 15 times. For those of you not well-versed in twitter lingo, a retweet is the reposting of a specific tweet by one of your followers if they think that your tweet is particularly tweetworthy. I spent some time trying to figure out why on earth someone would want their followers to know where a comic book writer was having dinner, and I couldn’t come up with even one semi legitimate reason. It seems as thought these retweets occurred simply as a result of his fame and the star-crossed adulation it brings with it.
I personally could never imagine making one of my quite frankly inane tweets and then having hundreds or even thousands of strangers passing it along to their friends, but it seems like celebrities have to live with it constantly. They resort to dubious means like creating fake online identities to interact with friends or simply not having a facebook account (the horror!), but even then, countless impersonators will take your place and make posts on your behalf. It seems like an awful lot of bother just to have an outlet to interact with people you know.
Granted, the incredibly explosive nature of these updates can be utilised incredibly effectively, and is done so by the likes of new organisations and bands looking to get the word out. But for the most part, the posts these celebrities make are similar to the ones we plebeians do and it seems incredibly strange to me.
I could rant on and on about why this is so strange, but I’ll end here with a question: the next time you post a selfie or complain about homework, what would it be like for 6000 strangers to tell all their friends?
Abzonnian Ramblings 