On April 14th, Ashton Kutcher realized that he had approximately 850,000 Twitter followers, second only to CNN’s 899,000. Over the course of the next two days, he made it his mission to be the owner of the first Twitter account to reach 1,000,000 followers. He achieved the task on Thursday, and celebrated the victory on Oprah’s show… where she made her first tweet. Kutcher commented that we’ve reached an age where one man’s voice can surpass that of an entire network (I’m paraphrasing, I don’t have the exact quote).
I don’t have anything against Ashton Kutcher. We all liked That 70′s Show, some of us liked Punk’d, and apparently a fair amount of people enjoy his generically interchangeable romantic comedies. But what does it say when CNN, a news network, who actively promotes its Twitter account on air, can be surpassed by a celebrity, who declared his Twitter manifesto on a 1 minute Youtube post?
Kutcher is right, his voice has indeed surpassed CNN’s… at least on Twitter. But does he have anything to say? Will the next guy? Can anybody say anything truly profound in 140 characters or less?
CNN made a conscientious effort to use this exciting new technology to promote news and world affairs. Kutcher used it as a forum to show how cool he is, and won. Americans have decided, at least for the moment, that Twitter is not most useful when used as a tool for education and global awareness. It is at its best when they can hear what Kelso has to say.
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May 5, 2009 at 10:21 am
Stephen Ransom
Excellent observation – except that many folks HAVE harnessed the power of Twitter and they mostly seem to be educators. We teachers have a way of repurposing things to become beneficial in some way. Although I could easily go on without Twitter, it has enriched my personal learning network and provides me with up-to-date information, opportunities, and resources in my field – not to mention that it has been a great way to find answers to various things very quickly. So, never write off a tool based upon mainstream media usage; rather see if it is being used in meaningful ways somewhere. In all truthfulness, I couldn’t care less that Oprah or Kutcher or any celebrity, for that matter, was using Twitter. They are not part of my PLN and I don’t have time for useless trivia and banal factoids. But, I do love Twitter.