Ghost Twittering
The New York Times had an interesting article yesterday about celebrity “ghost twittering”, where celebrity Twitter account are written by a chosen representative. I hadn’t really thought that this reality of book-writing had extended to social media, but it makes total sense. Celebrities are highly constructed and branded individuals, and a social media representation of their true selves may not mesh with that. There is this insatiable desire to see the “real” person behind the paparazzi-induced mask, but the hidden self is kept hidden for a reason. I guess we can’t expect social networking media to tear down the mask in any real way. Sites like Twitter seem to be just another mask beneath the outermost, another layer between the brand and the person.
I am a little disappointed though. I saw in social media the potential for prominent public figures to divert from the self/brand dichotomy and convey a message directly without the filter of the press. A ghost-twitterer may not be the same as the press, but it’s still a level of removal. More importantly, it’s a level of removal that is not made known. Transparency is the problem here. I understand the use of a site like Twitter as a marketing tool, but this should be made explicit. Take Britney Spears Twitter page as an example: some of her posts are signed by her and others are signed by various members of her management and marketing teams (I know this information from reading the NYT article, not from actually reading her Twitter page, BTW). I think that this is the right way to do it and openly declare that this window into the star is as actively constructed as the celebrity persona itself.
We can obviously never really know who is writing posts on Twitter or any other social media site. Authorship and authenticity are tricky subjects on the internet. The best we can do is be as honest as possible. If someone is writing a message for you, say so. The expectation that we’re seeing the real person through these celebrity tweets, however naive it may be, shouldn’t be falsely encouraged. I’m not saying a person such as Barack Obama should take time out of his schedule to write his own tweets, just that people should know who’s writing them on behalf of him.
Link to the NYT article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/technology/internet/27twitter.html
3 years ago