In this week’s topic; we explored the realm of twitter and activities within such as celebrities and non human twitter users, otherwise known as “bots”.
The term celebrity in this topic is defined as a practice rather than referring to a famous person.”Celebrity is a genre of representation and a discursive effect” (Turner, 2004) Another term used in the lecture was that of micro-celebrity which “describes a prevailing style of behavior both online and off, linked to the increase in popularity of ‘self-branding’ and strategic self-presentation” (Hearns, 2008).
For some people the main reason to make a twitter account is to follow their beloved celebrities, for me personally, I wanted to follow Chris Tucker. Their presence allows them to connect with their fans and as a result “create an intimacy between participant and follower, publicly acknowledge fans, and use language and cultural references to create affiliations with followers” as described by Alice Marwick . What is clear is that celebrities can literally tweet a single letter and it’d get thousands and thousands of likes and retweets. The challenge for celebrity presence in social media is to be consistent and maintain connection with followers. Some celebrities hire people purely to take care of their social media obligations whilst some celebrities are just more out there posting regularly (e.g Kardashians)
Amongst the presence of celebrities on twitter, an even interesting entity are present online which can be as influential online; bots.
In 2013 on a Huffington Post article (Link below), there was an twitter account of a Brazilian journalist named Carina Santos, with a twitter name of scarina91. She made around 50 tweets a day and had 700+ followers. She was deemed more influential by social media analytics than Ryan Seacrest. However Carina Santos is a bot. This case highlights how effective social media presence can be achieved through simple strategies, as an algorithm of some sort which the bot functioned by, could attract followers to the account. It also highlights how twitter users could be fooled into thinking this bot was indeed a human, showing the”highly formulaic style of many twitter feeds”.
In retrospect to this, as celebrity online presence require a certain level of maintenance to engage followers and rise in popularity, and the fact that technology exists to allow twitter accounts to be effectively run by bots, I leave a question: Do you think there are celebrities (And if you can, name examples) who may be bots on twitter and why you think it?
Resources
The influence of Twitter Bots: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/08/twitter-bots-influence_n_3542561.html
ryanuow 
Hi Ryan! Your blog post this week was very informative and insightful. Your post furthered my knowledge on celebrities and their online presence, as l also looked at this concept in my blog post. Your meme is hilarious as it is so true; you never know who could be behind a Tweet or an Instagram photo. One suggestion could be to include one or two sentences on why you chose to create your meme and its relevance to the topic. Here is a link to an article that may be of interest to you – ‘That’s not a celebrity you’re following on Twitter, it’s an assistant’ “http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/8/6121985/celebrity-twitter-adam-levine Overall l really enjoyed reading your blog!! Well Done.
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Thankyou 🙂
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Hey Ryan,
Great Job ! I can see a lot of work has gone into this, with great references which are also very relevant ! The ‘bot’ concept is well explained and you demonstrate a wide knowledge about the branding of celebrities. Fantastic use of meme-age too!
-Marc
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