This article was written by Joel Postman…I think it is a great one to pass on to the fellow Xanga bloggers
Fake celebrity bloggers and Twitterers. They’re the cubic zirconiums of social media. They aren’t real, but in some ways, they shine brighter than the genuine object, and they can’t help but catch our eye.
The craze started in the blogosphere. Last year’s most talked about CEO blog wasn’t written by a CEO at all. The Fake Steve Jobs blog, which turned out to have been written by Forbes reporter Dan Lyons, was the subject of constant buzz, not only as people speculated as to who was actually writing it, with some suspecting ironically that it might have been written by Jobs himself, but also as we got to read a pretty good interpretation of what Jobs might have said, were he not such a secretive CEO.
I was asked by the Christian Science Monitor why I thought fake CEO blogs were so popular, and I felt it was because “parody is a good way to touch a figure that doesn’t want (to) – or can’t take the time to – be bothered with honest and direct communication.”
The fake celebrity craze has made its way to Twitter. There are lots of celebrities on Twitter, more of them bogus than authentic. Whenever a celebrity turns up on Twitter, there’s all kinds of excitement as the news spreads through the network, and then, more often than not, there’s the second round of news in which the fraud is uncovered.
In February, author Seth Godin disappointed thousands when he revealed that not only was the Seth Godin on Twitter bogus, but the real Seth Godin did not have time to be on Twitter.
But there are real Twitter celebrities. If you’d like, treat the following list as a quiz, and visit the Twitter profile for each person to see if you can figure out which ones are real, and which are the creations of fans. (I will post the real answers in a week.)
Henry Rollins
MC Hammer
Richard Dawkins
Stephen Colbert or Stephen Colbert or Stephen Colbert
Chuck Norris
David Letterman
Bill Gates
Borat
William Shatner
Snoop Dogg
50 Cent
jerry474 