Simon Cowell: follow him, if you must, @TheXFactor. Photograph: Mario Anzuoni/Reuters
There's this fantastic/horrible joke. Question: you're in a room with Hitler, Stalin and Simon Cowell; you have a gun loaded with only two bullets ? what do you do? Answer: shoot Simon Cowell twice.
Yo, that is a joke, not an incitement of violence against Cowell. (Repeat: please do not harm Simon Cowell, or anyone else, for that would be very, very wrong.) But it is rooted in pretty much the objective fact that Cowell is ? how should one word this? ? repulsive. At least, he's as repulsive an entertainment figure as we have to cringe about these days, now that Charlie Sheen and Paris Hilton seem to have vanished.
And why is he so deplorable? Because he is so cynical, and so obnoxious, and so ubiquitous, and so rich and so rich and so rich ? from pandering to our basest selves. As such, he is my personal moral compass. When he points north, I head south. If Simon says "yes", I says, "no, thank you." If Cowell came out against war, cancer and slavery, I'd be obliged to rethink my position.
All of which makes it hard to process this little news tidbit: for his US version of Pop Idol-knockoff show "The X Factor", Cowell has partnered with Twitter to let the world tweet its response to the various singers vying for X-ness.
"The only powerful people now on TV," Cowell told the New York Times, "are the people on Twitter and Facebook."
Ugh. If Simon Cowell, the oligarch of cheap theatrics, the evil prince of middlebrow, the V-necked grifter who conned mass audiences into imagining themselves imbued with rarified tastes ? if he has embraced Twitter, doesn't that mean, ipso facto, that Twitter has been defiled? Twitter, the engine of the Arab Spring! Twitter, the life-and-death news source out of Haiti. Twitter, undoer of pervy congressmen and crappy airlines. Twitter, barometer of the Zeitgeist. Does its expropriation for something so trivial and bombastic as "The X Factor" not trivialise it, and us, along the way?
What you are now experiencing is my moral compass spinning haywire. Because, upon studious consideration, what this news reflects is not that Twitter has lost its virtue. What it reflects is that Simon Cowell, however loathsomely successful, became so not by disregarding human behavior, but by relentlessly ? and profitably ? embracing it.
Here, he is doing no more than listening to the people, among them MIT thinker Henry Jenkins, author of The Convergence Culture. In fulfilment of Jenkins's vision, content is now intermingling with popular desires before our very eyes. Creators and the group formerly known as the audience are exchanging DNA, 140 characters at a time. We, the hoi polloi, have stormed the Hollywood Bastille, and the revolution is being Twitterised.
Nauseated as I am to concede this point, what Cowell understands is that there is no expropriation afoot here at all. There is no vulgarisation, no cheapening, no hierarchy of value on Twitter or anywhere else in the socialsphere. Fundamentally, there is no difference between the tweets "The X Factor" will receive and the ones that have helped fuel the Arab Spring.
This crystallised for me, early in the year, in an interview I conducted with a young woman named Mona Seif, who was a democracy activist in the thick of foment in Cairo's Tahrir Square. The conversation had turned to Twitter, whereupon I observed that the Arab Spring was a rather eloquent answer to those who dismiss Twitter as a tool of the self-indulgent, blathering 140 characters at a time about the trivia of their lives. Curiously, Mona didn't bite:
"Yeah. I understand this criticism because I've been getting it a lot from my friends, but the whole point is that engaging different people in bits of your life is really what makes it a powerful tool. Usually, I use Twitter for really personal things, so I just share moments from my work or moments from my love life or I talk about my cats or my family. And it engages lots of different people, so when these people are following you and suddenly, you are talking about a torture case, some of them might not usually be exposed to such cases. But because they are following me and there is an ongoing conversation between us, they would suddenly be engaged in this, as well."
In short, if Twitter is to be a barometer of the Zeitgeist and an agent of change, it must first be where we live, wherever and whatever, in engagement with whomever. It is built not on ideals but on relationships, and until you have established one, nobody much cares what you say.
So, unless there is a marketplace for this idea:
October 26: ASTRO�Bradley!!! Dude is a star!�#Xfactor
? then there never will be an audience for this one:
February 11: we got rid of Mubarak! Egypt won! #Jan25
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/oct/26/simon-cowell-twitter-revolution
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