Inner Solace

America’s Tweethearts | vanityfair.com (via disoriented)

I just read this and I can’t help but feel how condescending the VF article was.  Sure the only person I know of in it is Felicia Day, but some things from the article made me wonder what the writer actually thought of the people they were calling tweethearts.

The writer referred to them constantly as ‘girls’, when they’re aged 26 to 30 and they work for a living.  How old are you, grandmother who penned the article? 36.

On Twitter, she wrote it “doesn’t even require real sentences, only a continual patter of excessively declarative and abbreviated palaver.”. While this is true, “doesn’t even” paints some definite bias towards how one should feel about the people she is writing about[1].  On the people she describes as tweethearts, “It so happens that they are nice girls—the Internet’s equivalent of a telephone chat line staffed by a bunch of cheerleaders”[2].  Is that all they are, ‘nice cheerleaders’?

What about talking about their achievements, or what actually makes these people popular or tweethearts other than their multitudes of followers? Popularity just doesn’t spring out of thin air.

The author writes, “the act of text-messaging the world [snip] is the essential feat of a twilebrity”. Well.. no. There are a couple factors that make a ‘twilebrity’.  Being able to text message isn’t actually one of them, it’s just a medium.  I mean check out @ActuallyNPH’s starting tweets.  They technically didn’t fit within the 140 character mark, but his ability to get his meaning and sense of humour across despite his truncated messages suggests some level of communicative skill, not simply an ability to text message.

Aside from prior celebrity, content is what keeps people coming back, not just the ability to jam 140 characters or less into some semblance of a message.  Not the “droppings” the writer mentions such as “getting highlights before class,” “I hrd u had fun!,” “Wah, missing my twittr time!”.  If that is all these people are tweeting, I’m not entirely sure how they managed to get and keep their several hundred thousand to 1.6 million followers.

I don’t care how much of a fan I am of their work, if that is all someone was tweeting… well, there’s only so much faecal tweet matter one can handle.  And most of us get more than enough spam a day without inflicting ourselves with more inane day-to-day messages from people we don’t know personally.

Or perhaps I missed that the point of the article was only about critiquing twitter as a new media source and its relation to real-time web (oh and how many articles have we seen about that already) rather than about the tweethearts the article title suggests it is about.

[1] And I am suddenly reminded of the way the outcast describes or perceives the in-crowd in those teen movies. Just as an aside.

[2] A bunch of pretty girls who call out short and witty messages with no real depth to improve morale.  Well that clears things up.

fuckyeahmasioka:

asteroidfish:

3 people I love very much

OMG WHEN WAS THIS?
and NATHAN FILLION/CAPTAIN HAMMER!!! *NERDGASMS*

Ooh, three of my favourite geeks ever.

(via motancharoen)

Dr Horrible won the category Emmy. :) Grats and well done to them all!

And Joss in sneakers. :P

disoriented:

01-06 (via ecaloshay)

Check out the comments on this photo. Totally awesome. Thanks ecaloshay and Felicia Day!

It was a pleasure. :) I was just fortunate that Felicia Day and her friend(s) are so nice. :)

The tricky part was when I tweeted her a thank you and you IM’d me straight away asking me what I was thanking her for. I had to ignore you until today because I knew I wouldn’t be able to evade the question.

(via egspoony) (via disoriented)

From Tycho:

I also saw Felicia Day at the show, who gave me a brush and told me to groom her. This is a thing that really happened, and it was bizarre, but not so bizarre that I wouldn’t do it. It was like brushing a unicorn.

From Felicia:

Tycho was especially nice and groomed me, something I’ve been waiting for since they posted this comic.   I’m not as frightened as I look.  It was an expert brushing.