twitter-losophy

ghah, all the famous people on twitter are freaking me out. and they all follow each other! it's like animals in the wilderness, you have to follow one back to its den and there are half a dozen more. i almost wish i could have twitter "channels" to keep separate from one another the three categories of people on twitter:

1. people i know, or know on the internet, but with my approximate level of famousness, such as my boyfriend (@forsoothed), my friend Internet Matt (@tederick), etc.
2. people who are kind of internet-famous, but who normal people have never heard of. some of these people are actually famous FOR twitter, which is weird, like a recursive kind of fame. you can tell who they are because they have 6,000 followers but their bio says, like, "blogger/stay-at-home-dad."
3. famous-famous people, who even normal people have heard of, you know, like @Oprah.

Maybe this is just me, letting my totally class-conscious hangups show through, but i kind of don't want to read James's updates right next to Ellen DeGeneres'. It makes it seem like these people are all part of a vast network, like, "People Jocelyn knows/is interested in," when in fact they have nothing to do with each other and are not, in fact, equally interesting to me. (By which I mean that James's updates are MORE interesting because he might, at any moment, mention me and how awesome I am and how I made the yummiest chowder and make the cutest sounds/concentrating-y face when i am playing super mario bros., whereas Ellen, funny and charming as she is, never mentions me. EVER.)

i guess you could argue that this is just the democratizing power of the internet. but i don't see it that way. it's almost like the famous people do not deserve to take over twitter; they already get to constantly express themselves publicly, in much more widely-acknowledged ways. You know, like the many interviews where they explain how they're so spiritual, and they feel like acting is really a process, or they love reading chick lit it's totally their secret shame, or (this is my favourite) they were such geeks in high school, or whatever. get off twitter! just say this stuff on tv like you usually do!

in spite of what i said about the famous people (you know, in the previous paragraph), @Timbaland's entries are hilarious. and @neilgaiman's are amazing, not to mention amazingly frequent, although he's a writer so he kind of straddles the line between category 2 and category 3. same with @hodgman. i mean, it's not like i'm going to unfollow them. i'll read their updates obsessively on my ipod on stolen wifi. but i'll continue to be freaked out.