Why I Love Twitter

Psst, come here! Yeah, you, over there, with the yellow tinge running all over your face and far too much time on your hands, sitting there, idly trolling through the web looking for your next fix of pointless information to repeat to your friends in an even more pointless fashion. Yeah, that’s it, you! Let me tell you a little secret… one that I’ve really tried to keep quiet for the best part of the year, not that I’m ashamed or anything, and not that you’re probably not already aware, but just because it may be a little bit boring, but anyway… I fucking love Twitter.

Like, I really love it. I spend more time on it than anything else, I tweet more than I sleep. I tweet outside, inside, upside down, whilst having sex, whilst on the toilet, I tweet trying on shoes, making toast and shaving. Hell, I’ve tweeted in my dreams three times before. But I love it for reasons you may not quite expect.

Twitter is the best thing on the internet right now, and I really don’t care if you disagree. You hear the same thing all the time from the boring doubters; “It’s not as good as Facebook, it doesn’t have pictures”, “It’s just a load of people talking at each other”, “It’s only good for celebrities”. It’s this latter part that completely defines Twitter for me: Celebrities. But I don’t mean following them or caring about anything at all that comes from their scabby, money-grabbing fingers (even though Peter Serafinowicz is absolutely HIGHLARRYOOS on there). Oh God no. As if I care about the words of some egotistical, vain, self-obsessed show off who only cares about his own opinions and isn’t a single bit arsed about anyone else’s (err…).

The true reason I totally bum Twitter to death isn’t to hear, acknowledge or understand why Jonathan Ross is still banging on about Sachs-gate, or why Stephen Fry wants to make love to a tiny chimp-like creature, no, I bum Twitter ‘cos I like the celebrity death rumours that seem to occur almost all the time.

With this ever growing list of famous people dying throughout the year, people across the globe seem to have really been inspired by all these dead celebrities. One bored person decides to make a mock up of a popular, trusted news provider and, usually never actually intending on it going further than a few friends who are no doubt ‘in on the joke’, they link it on their Twitter.

Then some numb nuts (usually a slightly stalkerish fanboy/fangirl) happens to search for said celebrity, sees the tweet, believes the hype and passes it on to all their silly little followers.

About a month ago, before attempting to enter the land of nod, I saw Zach Braff on the trending topics. Which would be odd ‘cos Zach Braff just left Scrubs and was probably sat at home, crying in the corner, smashing his against the wall screaming “idiot!” whilst waiting for his career to completely nosedive. But people probably wouldn’t have known that.

Actual photo of Braff pre skull-bashing

Anyway, so news spreads that Braff had died when really he was fine and dandy and probably a tad confused. Apparently it all started from this website – which has now been changed to some kind of statement explaining all what happened, including Braff himself calling the guy a “douchebag”.

I, of course, find it all hilarious, the way such ‘news’ can travel around the world in an instant – to the point where actual news providers have to come out and deflate the claims – just ‘cos some geek in the States knows how to use Photoshop a little bit.

It’s happened tonnes of times though, and always with the most random of celebrities. When Patrick Swayze died a few weeks ago, I remained sceptical for hours until the beeb finally reported it, simply because I was pretty sure I’d heard about him dying at least three times in the past, and I might have already thought he was dead and still not given a shit.

A lot of these hoaxes tend to follow the exact same pattern as well, presumably because of any such web-page generator they’re using. In 2006 – obviously pre-Twitter – Tom Hanks was the subject of a mass e-mail rumour when someone clocked on to a website stating that he’d “fallen off a cliff somewhere in New Zealand”. Obviously this wasn’t true, he was in California or somewhere else utterly generic, but people believed it so his people had to make a statement.

A mere few months later, the same thing happened Tom Cruise. Like, exactly the same. He also conveniently fell off some cliffs in New Zealand. And people still believed it. Admittedly it’s quite a rural country and no doubt those cliffs are some slippery motherflippers, and maybe they weren’t signposted enough or something, but who’d have funk those cliffs would kill two Hollywood stars in a matter of months? If I were famous I’d stay well clear of New Zealand, let alone it’s cliffs.

But wait, hang on, the holy grail of celebrity death hoaxes, and probably Twitter peaking in its own brilliance

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Tags: America, Social networking, Twitter

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 11:23 am and is filed under Comment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.