Katy Perry Tweeted @ME And I Liked It!

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Media Meditation #1

Last night October 21, 2009 at approximately 5:38pm I decided to participate in the twitter world by posting my personal thoughts, proving to be a personal shift. I tweeted “can’t wait to dress up like @katyperry for Halloween! So excited! What is everyone else being?” A few minuets later I received a text message from one of my friends informing me that Katy Perry had responded to ME on twitter. Which proves to be quite the technological shift! (A friend texting me about a celebrity responding to me on a social network!) Could it be true? A real CELEBRITY responding to me, a Champlain College student! I instantly signed back on to twitter to see if this was true. Sure enough six minuets later at 5:44 Katy Perry tweeted “I’m gonna b you… creepy. RT@coreyography88 can’t wait to dress up like @katyperry for Halloween! So excited! What is everyone else being?”
When I originally tweeted I never thought that she would actually respond to me, taking into consideration she has 1,317,363 followers. I was very surprised/ honored my tweet was “worthy” of a retweet. What surprised me even more was the amount of follower requests I received from people all over the globe after her tweet. Within two hours I received 18 follow requests and 24 mentions, all from Katy Perry fans that were mostly in their teens. They clearly were not following me because of my inspiring tweets. They followed me because a celebrity mentioned me, which is an obvious reason to follow someone right? To take it one step further I made my facebook status “Katy Perry tweeted @ME and I liked it.” Six people “liked” my status and three people commented on it within an hour. The mentions were quite comical a lot of people told me they were “so jealous” or “being Katy too” one person even said, “@coreyography88 will blow it. No worries.” I couldn’t believe the uproar my tweet caused. I couldn’t believe all of these fans took the time to compliment me and or diss me via twitter. All of these tweets went from objective to subjective proving to be a discursive shift. I think this situation demonstrates how much the entertainment industry influences our decisions and behaviors whether we realize it or not. Why is this so?
The Novel “Amusing Ourselves To Death” written by Neil Postman is about the “the televisions” influence on social discourse. Postman states, “Everyone goes to television for all these things, and more, which is why television resonates so powerfully throughout the culture. Television is our culture’s principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore-and this is the critical point- how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged […] entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse.”(Postman 92). In today’s society we are constantly bombarded with celebrity images on the television and the Internet. They become apart of our daily lives. We become so used to seeing them, we start to think we know them personally and are easily persuaded by them. In the book “Media and Society” written by David Croteau and William Hoyness the question “Why do so many of us pay attention to the details of the lives of actors, musicians, and other media personalities” (p. 294) is answered. Josh Gamson states, “Celebrity watching is a complex act and that audiences use a range of interpretive strategies in these mass-mediated interactions with the celebrity world. Some audiences essentially believe what they see, take the celebrities at face value, and focus on their great gifts or talents. Others see celebrity as an artificial creation and enjoy the challenge of seeing behind the images, unmasking these celebrity ‘fictions’”(Media&Society 296). Gamson then explains people find joy in gossiping about celebrities. It is “fun” because the information is irrelevant and there are no potential consequences for the gossip.
This "celebrity gossip" is exactly what happened to me last night on twitter. Those dedicated fans out there that follow Katy Perry saw that Katy Perry crossed the invisible line that divides celebrities and fans from interacting and decided to gossip about it! That being said “Katy Perry tweeted @me and I liked it!”


Here is a Katy Perry classic for your viewing pleasure!