IIRC asking @dsquareddigest what the attraction of Twitter was as opposed to blogging. He said something like "here I can shout at David Aaronovitch and he responds"
@dsquareddigest There is an interesting story in how the norm developed that prominent people respond and engage with Twitter, while they refused (and still refuse) to do the same with blogs
@dsquareddigest This is a really bad result! Blogs are good, and from the celebrity point of view, it's less unpleasant to read a bunch of blogs than have 9,253 bot-men hooting in your mentions
@dsquareddigest Is it just that reading blogs requires a conscious effort to engage with your critics, while teh twitter gets up in your pocket?
@dsquareddigest Or do we have to grasp that web browsers were still scary to the elite quite recently but they could just about handle SMS?
@dsquareddigest One terrible consequence of this is that it put people who shout at the TV in actual unfiltered contact with their targets. Rightly, they are socialised to expect that you don't actually talk to celebrities but to a management apparatus
@dsquareddigest This is no longer so. The relationship is direct, unmediated, and haptically intimate. There is a radical disjuncture between the real and imagined audience
@dsquareddigest This reminds me of that time someone on here saw @DawnHFoster on Sky TV and thought she could fix some billing dispute he had with the network
@dsquareddigest @DawnHFoster They're aware of the fake and performative nature of media but not in a way that helps them interact with it usefully or even just non-harmfully
