I am literally angry with rage!
I was happy to see a link to an article that involved Felicia Day today. Because, you know, it's Felicia. When I actually clicked the link, my first thought was that, in the picture accompanying the article, she looks gorgeous but kind of uncomfortable. And I'm guessing, having now read the article, that none of the women(I'm sorry, "girls") it mentions, "America’s Tweethearts" (wth), knew how the finished product would be when they agreed to be photographed for it.
It's one thing to write an article about how much you hate twitter and how much contempt you have for the people who use it. But to actually invite people using it for a photoshoot? That's just plain insulting.
Felicia herself tweeted a link to this reaction to said article, which makes good points but doesn't even touch on all the offensive things in it. Some excerpts:
"Whether you consider Twitter a worldwide experiment in extreme narcissism or a nifty tool for real-time reporting-a plane ditches in the Hudson, millions take to the streets in Tehran-it may not yet have dawned on your text-saturated brain that it’s also a path to becoming famous. Not real fame, mind you, or even Internet-celebrity fame, but a special, new category of fame: twilebrity."
"For tweeple, e-mail messages are sonnets, Facebook is practically Tolstoy. "
"Twitter doesn’t even require real sentences, only a continual patter of excessively declarative and abbreviated palaver. "
"Each day, these women speed easily across the Twitformation Superhighway on their iPhones and laptops, leaving droppings in their wake: “getting highlights before class,” “I hrd u had fun!,” “Wah, missing my twittr time!” They use a lot of “hashtags,” which is a way of identifying posts on a certain topic-like Twilight or Tiger’s mistresses-and often participate in chain-letter-style tweets, adding their haiku to such threads as OMGFacts. (Sample OMGs: “You’ll eat 35,000 cookies in your lifetime”; “banging your head against a wall uses 150 calories per hour.”) And somehow this fascinates millions of readers."
"But when it comes to listening, well, that’s where these twilebrities shine. It so happens that they are nice girls-the Internet’s equivalent of a telephone chat line staffed by a bunch of cheerleaders-and it’s all free."
"Elfin redhead Felicia Day, 30, a geek-Webisode actress, has drawn 1.6 million followers for her tweets. “Doors were closed to us before,” says Day. “Now the tools for success have been democratized. It’s just me and whoever wants to talk to me, wherever they are in the world.”"
Look, I certainly agree that some of their points are true for certain people. But ... has the woman(!!!) who wrote this article ever even heard of Felicia? Who, according to this, is not a talented writer, creator and actor, but someone who doesn't have "real fame or even Internet-celebrity fame, but a special, new category of fame". And who, by her quote, couldn't possibly be talking about the way the industry is changing and the instant exchange between fellow actors/creators and fans alike, but about slyly achieving some kind of obscure fame she normally would not be entitled to?
But what do I know. I'm just a stupid person who uses twitter. Facebook, to me, is practically Tolstoy after all.
It's one thing to write an article about how much you hate twitter and how much contempt you have for the people who use it. But to actually invite people using it for a photoshoot? That's just plain insulting.
Felicia herself tweeted a link to this reaction to said article, which makes good points but doesn't even touch on all the offensive things in it. Some excerpts:
"Whether you consider Twitter a worldwide experiment in extreme narcissism or a nifty tool for real-time reporting-a plane ditches in the Hudson, millions take to the streets in Tehran-it may not yet have dawned on your text-saturated brain that it’s also a path to becoming famous. Not real fame, mind you, or even Internet-celebrity fame, but a special, new category of fame: twilebrity."
"For tweeple, e-mail messages are sonnets, Facebook is practically Tolstoy. "
"Twitter doesn’t even require real sentences, only a continual patter of excessively declarative and abbreviated palaver. "
"Each day, these women speed easily across the Twitformation Superhighway on their iPhones and laptops, leaving droppings in their wake: “getting highlights before class,” “I hrd u had fun!,” “Wah, missing my twittr time!” They use a lot of “hashtags,” which is a way of identifying posts on a certain topic-like Twilight or Tiger’s mistresses-and often participate in chain-letter-style tweets, adding their haiku to such threads as OMGFacts. (Sample OMGs: “You’ll eat 35,000 cookies in your lifetime”; “banging your head against a wall uses 150 calories per hour.”) And somehow this fascinates millions of readers."
"But when it comes to listening, well, that’s where these twilebrities shine. It so happens that they are nice girls-the Internet’s equivalent of a telephone chat line staffed by a bunch of cheerleaders-and it’s all free."
"Elfin redhead Felicia Day, 30, a geek-Webisode actress, has drawn 1.6 million followers for her tweets. “Doors were closed to us before,” says Day. “Now the tools for success have been democratized. It’s just me and whoever wants to talk to me, wherever they are in the world.”"
Look, I certainly agree that some of their points are true for certain people. But ... has the woman(!!!) who wrote this article ever even heard of Felicia? Who, according to this, is not a talented writer, creator and actor, but someone who doesn't have "real fame or even Internet-celebrity fame, but a special, new category of fame". And who, by her quote, couldn't possibly be talking about the way the industry is changing and the instant exchange between fellow actors/creators and fans alike, but about slyly achieving some kind of obscure fame she normally would not be entitled to?
But what do I know. I'm just a stupid person who uses twitter. Facebook, to me, is practically Tolstoy after all.