» Will on Twitter
Thanks to Twitter, Will Harris is best friends with a whole host of celebrities. Sort of.
I’ve recently spent a large portion of my free time stalking celebrities. In fact, since signing up to Twitter.com – built to satisfy our collective desire to know the exact location of Stephen Fry 24/7 lest the national treasure does another bunk to Belgium – I’ve become scarily obsessed with the lives of the rich and famous.
I know, for example, that @KevinSpacey is shockingly bad with apostrophes, and Tweets like a granddad who’s just learnt to text. I know that @AlanCarr can be just as funny in a 140-character ‘Tweet’ as he is on screen (“We’ve got Britney on! Well I say that; she recorded all her answers and I’m lipsynching the questions”). I also suspect @BritneySpears herself has someone on the payroll to do all her Tweeting for her, although she must have burnt her Pepsi millions or she’d be able to afford someone with more imagination than “Just wrapped my first show in London. I love the costumes. Britney.” Then again, maybe that’s just how you Tweet when you have your KFC laced with mood stabilisers every four hours.
“I know, for example, that @KevinSpacey is shockingly bad with apostrophes”
The point is I’m hooked, and who wouldn’t be? With a few clicks of my mouse I can find out not only which concert Elizabeth Taylor went to see last night but also whether they allowed her wheelchair access (it was @AndreaBocelli and they did, thanks for asking). This is amazing. It’s like I’m best friends with Elizabeth Taylor. Admittedly it’s the kind of friendship where one friend makes sporadic comments about gay rights and AIDS and the other is a mute, invisible ghost, but still.
I wonder if this makes me a stalker. Am I stalking these celebrities? Is going through @DavidHasselhoff’s news-feed just a variant of going through his bins, minus the airfare? And why, having discovered there are Twitterers out there who – I can barely bring myself to say it – pretend to be celebrities, do I find myself genuinely troubled over whether to ‘stalk’ @the_ZacEfron, @RealZacEfron, or @ThaRealZacEfron?
Of course I haven’t completely lost the plot. I know Elizabeth Taylor is in an iron lung in Bel Air, Stephen Fry is safely tucked up in a recording studio, and I am just a man at a computer who they will never meet. But hey, however sad it makes me, at least I’m not pretending to be J Lo. Not until my next bucket of KFC anyway.
