By David Ponce
At 2:13am, EST, Ashton Kutcher officially reached 1,000,012 followers on Twitter. Why is this a big deal? Aside from the fact that he’s the first to surpass a million followers… he did it while beating CNN in a open contest. If you haven’t been following the race, that’s ok: it means you have lives elsewhere than in front a computer screen. But if you’re curious, here’s CNN’s take on it. In short, CNN and Ashton were racing to a million, and Ashton got there first.
It matters because Ashton is one (sometimes annoying, sometimes brilliant) dude, while CNN is a huge corporation. For one man to have the same voice and reach as CNN is a significant milestone in the evolution of media and highlights to what degree the landscape has changed in the last few years. Traditional, mainstream media is getting its ass handed to them by blogs, microblogging services (like Twitter), social networks and social news sites (like Digg). These services and their popularity are rewriting the game from a top-down, filtered, edited and often propagandized approach, to a disseminated, democratized and organic system of news gathering. In short, we’re entering an age where the people decide what’s news, and how to consume it.
What might have been dismissed as a passing fad by many a few short years ago now has at least 1,000,012 (and rising) dissenting voices.
This does not impress me. Although it does not surprise me, it depresses me that a pop culture figure's words garner more interest that WORLD NEWS. Not only is this another step toward the shallow end of the pool, but it likely means that news organizations such as CNN, being for profit corporations, will likely dumb down their content even further. Prepare for more national headlines about a cute puppy who has gone missing, or news(?) articles about what styles are hot this summer. CNN.com's front page has already steadily declined with less and less news and more and more commentary on the news. Please, CNN, instead of reporting news, please tell me what I should think about the small slice of news you actually report. KTHXBYE!
I searched Kutchers Twitter page looking for one 'dissenting voice' out of one million and after sifting through 397,420 follower tweets stating ” Im taking a poop. ” I promptly gave up.
So aside from ashtons new title as Mr. Demi Moore his total effort has garnered nothing but the addition of a couple of new paragraphs [ be honest, sentences ] in Wikipedia.
Now all that remains is a case of ding-dong-dutch
to Mister Turner and to tell Larry King that “I told you such”
i guess the moral of the story is I'd get more views
writing about Ashton Kutcher rather than about news
To hear me sing my full summary, watch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHkDmKx435k
Now all that remains is a case of ding-dong-dutch
to Mister Turner and to tell Larry King that “I told you such”
i guess the moral of the story is I'd get more views
writing about Ashton Kutcher rather than about news
To hear me sing my full summary, watch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHkDmKx435k