{"id":2829,"date":"2009-09-10T13:24:39","date_gmt":"2009-09-10T18:24:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/?p=2829"},"modified":"2009-09-11T20:17:44","modified_gmt":"2009-09-12T01:17:44","slug":"on-celebrity-and-social-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/2009\/09\/10\/on-celebrity-and-social-media\/","title":{"rendered":"On celebrity and social media"},"content":{"rendered":"

L<\/span>ast week, I was tickled to stumble across this fun list of “cool Canadians on Twitter<\/a>.” I don’t know why, but Canadian celebrities just seem more accessible, somehow, don’t they? I promptly started following Bryan Adams, William Shatner, Jann Arden, Rick Mercer, Brent Butt, the Tragically Hip, Matthew Perry, and Great Big Sea on Twitter, rounding out my existing CanCon-follow repetoire of Burton Cummings, Douglas Coupland, Margaret Atwood, and Jian Ghomeshi.<\/p>\n

For the most part, I don’t see the point in following celebrities on Twitter. I mean, does Oprah <\/a>really tweet, or does one of her minions do it for her? With more than two million followers, she doesn’t need me. I simply haven’t been interested in following any celebrities up until now.<\/p>\n

But there’s something about these Canadian celebrities (and *air quotes* celebrities *\/air quotes*) that immediately feel more intimate and accessible. When I read Brent Butt’s tweets<\/a>, his voice and sense of humour are charmingly distinct — and his tweets are distinctly down to earth, like: “Ok… I should get back to work. Then again, I should also eat less cheese, and I don’t think THAT’S going to happen any time soon.” And reading Douglas Coupland’s tweets <\/a>is like 140 characters clipped directly from his books: “If you read the NYTimes site right after reading The Onion, reality morphs in a not unpleasant way. It’s like the news just had a stroke.” They seem pleasantly — ordinary, somehow.<\/p>\n

When I was 15 years old, I had a crush on a boy named Greg. I also had a massive crush on Bryan Adams. And Greg had an older sister who had a picture of herself on a train with Bryan Adams. I think I was more jealous of that girl than any other person before or since. Not only was she Greg’s sister and could see him each day at dinner, each morning at breakfast, any old time she pleased, but she had actually (gasp!) met (titter!) Bryan Adams (swoon!) in person<\/em>. It was beyond imaginable to me. The idea of simply being on the same train as Bryan Adams was fodder for endless hours of daydreaming, that long ago autumn of 1985.<\/p>\n

I laugh now when I think of how my 15-year-old self would shimmer and explode in a cloud of teenaged hormonal delight at the idea of following Bryan Adams on Twitter. It even gave my 40-year-old self a bit of a nostalgic shiver when he recently tweeted <\/a> “Ottawa today, got my first real six string…right here”. (I missed that concert, but caught a terrific one about a decade back, at Lansdowne.) <\/p>\n

There’s something about Twitter, when used properly, that invites an intimacy with both big and little C celebrity that would simply astonish my Tiger-Beat reading self of two decades ago. I’m under no delusion that Rick Mercer will ever follow my tweets (heck, he wouldn’t even pick up the bloggy gauntlet I threw down, back in 2005) but there’s still an undeniable thrill to feel even an illusory sort of connection to actual famous people, yanno? Apparently my inner 14-year-old is barely repressed, even at the best of times!<\/p>\n

I’ve been idling over this for a while, but I keep getting tangled up in my own words. What do you think? Do you follow any celebrities on twitter, or through other online forums? Do you actually try to talk to them? Does the fact that an author (or actor, musician, or other celeb) uses social media in a way that invites insight into their personality intrigue you or change how you feel about them? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, I was tickled to stumble across this fun list of “cool Canadians on Twitter.” I don’t know why, but Canadian celebrities just seem more accessible, somehow, don’t they? I promptly started following Bryan Adams, William Shatner, Jann Arden, Rick Mercer, Brent Butt, the Tragically Hip, Matthew Perry, and Great Big Sea on Twitter, … Continue reading “On celebrity and social media”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-how-i-love-the-interwebs","category-rants-and-rambles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2829"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2829\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2843,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2829\/revisions\/2843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}