“I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not tweet about the death of one, even an enemy ripped apart by Navy SEAL dogs with titanium fangs.” — Martin Luther King Jr.
No, Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t say that. I actually made that up just now. Because it’s the Internet, and apparently we make things up here!
Part of it was based on a real, original statement posted to Facebook by Jessica Dovey, an English teacher in Japan, whose words became famous worldwide when they were incorrectly attributed to the late civil-rights leader. And part of it was based on anapparently fictitious assertion that Navy SEAL dogs have their real teeth ripped out and replaced, Wolverine-style, with titanium chompers.
On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a canine cyborg.
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Speaking of Wolverine, I saw Hugh Jackman on stage Wednesday for the opening night of his one-man show, which runs for two weeks in San Francisco. He peppered his routine with jokes about Twitter, which is rapidly becoming the world’s most powerful platform for passing on improperly attributed quotes. And thenhe took his pants off.
At one point, in character as Peter Allen, the flamboyant (read: supergay) cabaret performer he played in “The Boy From Oz,” he anachronistically taunted the audience to photograph him: “Put me on Twitter, I don’t care.” That kept the ushers at the Curran Theater busy.
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The most interesting celebrities on Twitter are the inadvertent ones, though, like Dovey. And Sohaib Athar, an IT consultant who happened to be in Abbottabad, Pakistan, at the time of the helicopter raid in which Osama Bin Laden , the long-hidden leader of Al-Qaeda, was found and killed. Athar tweeted his observations of the raid in action, which led some to say he liveblogged the event.
There’s a raging (and ragingly stupid) debate in media-insider circles over whether that made him a “citizen journalist.” I find that term pretty empty of meaning — journalism is an uncertified profession. Are professional journalists somehow not citizens? Does anything besides the act of reporting ultimately define a reporter?
In any event, Athar now has more than 100,000 followers on Twitter, which should induce more than a little citizen jealousy among less-influential media types.
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Jackman, by contrast, has 656,187 followers. Beyond his real-world celebrity, I can’t say he’s done much to earn them: He went two years between tweets until he popped up again last month. Twitter fans are a patient bunch, I suppose. We unfollow out of annoyance, not out of silence.
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It puzzles me that Dovey, the shy teacher whose words, mashed up with a real quote from King and spread around the world, has a mere 296 followers. The hundreds of thousands following Jackman and Athar are missing out: Dovey reminded us that Wednesday was the fiftieth anniversary of the Freedom Riders’ first journey.
Next thing we’ll know, someone’s going to tweet that infamous segregation advocate Bull Connor put titanium fangs in the attack dogs he sicced on civil-rights demonstrators.
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Was Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson close to breaking news of Bin Laden’s death Sunday night in advance of the official announcement?
That’s what Keith Urbahn thinks. And he’s the former Pentagon official widely credited with telling the world on Twitter about Bin Laden.
In a recent interview with the New York Observer, heseemed bemused with his unwanted Twitter fame: “This is a bit of a distraction, and it reaches a little bit to the level of media navel-gazing for my taste.”
So instead of introspection, he pointed this out: A mere 47 seconds after Urbahn posted his famous “Hot damn” tweet, Johnson — whose cousin is a Navy SEAL —intimated that he’d heard “word that will shock the world.”
Sorry, Rock: You were 47 seconds too late. Every moment counts in the Twitterverse. It took less than a minute, after all, for Urbahn’s tweet to make its way to New York Times reporter Brian Stelter’s feed. From there it was off to the races, with tweets mentioning “Osama Bin Laden” shattering Twitter records.
Just like the reporters who feel strangely threatened by the rise of citizen journalists, maybe Johnson and Jackman should watch out for the rise of citizen celebrities.
