Is Twitter bad for celebrities wishing to connect with fans?

Stephen Fry’s recent spat with another user is a reminder that Twitter isn’t necessarily a good thing for our society
Matt Richardson
There have been some odd crazes throughout the last couple of decades. The atonal yammering of the Spice Girls; those bizarre Pokemon cards; the brief, but all too real, skateboarding fad in the early noughties when all things baggy and backward seemed the in-thing for anyone under fourteen; the rapid sneeze of manufactured pop-wannabes warbling away on Pop Idol; perhaps the creative genius of ITV plunging gaggles of unknown C-listers into the jungle and make them writhe and thrash about for their supper; and now Twitter.
And with each batty blush on the cheek of our times there has always been a leader. With every pop-culture epoch a chosen one has arisen. And so, for the troops of tweeters, out came none other than the incomparable Stephen Fry.
Now I adore Stephen Fry. I’ve digested his collected printings, watched most of his films, filched as many of his best lines as I can remember and even met him once on a rainy day in my local branch of WH Smiths. But even I, his biggest fan, trembled somewhat when he announced on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross that he had decided to unburden his every thought and theory to the general public through the miracle of micro-blogging.
I worried that the magic would go. I knew in reality that he must be human, that he couldn’t be spouting forth with such pith and verbal polish when brushing his teeth or preparing a light supper. Most of all, I feared our greatest wit and epigram-exhaler would be reduced to puffing out platitudes like the rest of us. But I was wrong. The tweets contained the usual insight and elegance; it was the British public that would prove his undoing.
As loony and slavering as the British public are known to be, reading the blockbuster of tweets sent Fry-wards invariably prompts you to clutch for support. A cornucopia of barefaced pleas, entreaties for signed photos, plugs and promotions, interviews, personal messages, pieces of advice, insults and assorted criticism and commentary. And it was one of these that almost derailed what history will know as the ‘Twitter Years’.
A user had the swagger to describe Fry’s tweets as ‘boring’, a similar sentiment expressed by some cheap-shot articles in the Times by various unheard-ofs. Fry spat back in agreement and declared that he was signing off, only for the morning to bring a change of heart and the message: ‘Arrived in LA feeling very foolish. Wasn’t the fault of the fellow who called me “boring”, BTW. A mood thing. Sunshine will help’ with normal tweeting being resumed forthwith.
Fry had expressed his chagrin that there was too much ‘aggression and unkindness around’ and therefore he would lay down the tweeting mantle for more gladsome pursuits. But that’s the exact problem: far from unveiling the twinkly, winsome mass of souls that one might think, allowing everyone ether-space to ventilate their views simply demonstrates the crusty layers of envy and one-upmanship at the core of us all.
The angry and envious used to be housed by newspapers, spending their days bashing out green-eyed assaults on the great and the good. Not only did the journalistic umbrella mean that these diatribes had to be marshalled into semi-enlivened prose, it also meant that these so-called critics might actually have some measure of know-how or good sense on which to base their captious carolling.
Now, with columns for the deluded and insane to paste their textual inadequacies, it is inevitable that more of the above will happen. While some might well want to pat Fry on the back or hymn his praise, the majority simply delight in carping and grousing about how he’s twittering his support away or not being uber-witty for half-five in the morning.
Far from entertaining the masses, entering into unvarnished contact with over a million people is always going to end in tears. The same can be said for Jonathan Ross, Russell Brand and the litter of other faces currently dominating Twitterdom.
Despite the fact that they are imparting free messages for fans, people always want more and never cease in huffing when the celebs can’t oblige. Instead of a jolly virtual chinwag, the viperous pressures of commercial advertising emerge alongside impossible whines for personal tributes to person A’s dying Granny etc. It’s a mutant version of fan mail, with all its oddities and bothersomeness intact.
I’m sure there are some benefits. Fry calling attention to the general idiocy of a Daily Mail hack over Stephen Gately’s death, and his promotion of edifying books like Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives are all well and good. But by entering the untried arena of non-stop public communication, he and others are opening themselves up to barrages of catty side-wipes and brassed off moans. No figure in history has ever had to deal with unremitting attention from such an audience; and I doubt that many could. Eventually it will wear you down.
It might sound a lark in principal, but the practice is a very different story.

The benefits of Twitter’s communication platform outweigh the occasional spats
Cat Turner
In the golden days of Hollywood, celebrities like Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart almost seemed to exist on a higher, more rarefied plane of reality than the crowds of people who breathlessly watched their every film. Back then, the famous were held in a kind of awe by their public, who would never even dream of poring over blown-up photographs of their spots and sweat-patches. Yet today this awe has degenerated into an avid and almost morbid fascination, fostered by the cruel rumours and deliberately unfortunate photographs of tabloid publications. The public has gone from gazing at celebrities through rose-tinted binoculars to stalking them through a gun sight. Every flaw of the celebrities whose careers we collectively build up and destroy is gleefully attacked, often under a guise of pious ‘concern’. In fact, we appear to have become so concerned about the various personal lives of celebrities these days that it is just too impossible to refrain from savagely splashing the gory details across the national press.
Until recently, however, the cultural phenomenon that is Stephen Fry seemed to be an exception to this rule. The British are nigh-on uniformly fond of his brand of gentlemanly wit, as exhibited in television shows like the cult hit QI, with dissenters strictly in the minority (the Facebook group, ‘I hate Stephen Fry- I’d like to punch his smug face’, has 46 members and counting). This is probably why one particular Twitter user incited such widespread anger when he dared to describe Fry’s output on the site as ‘boring’; with Fry promptly declaring in response that he would henceforth abandon the site. Suddenly, even the self-proclaimed and publicly acclaimed ‘Lord of the Dance, Prince of Swimwear and Blogger’ was no longer sacred. At any rate, this is a more logical explanation for the outcry which some have attributed to the almost cult-like sway in which Fry holds his fans: it is simply that his fans guard his reputation all the more jealously because he is of one of the few celebrities in the Britain who isn’t habitually mocked.
Now, I am a huge fan of Stephen Fry, and as unwilling as anyone else to see him being insulted, but I’m not sure that his being criticised in such a way is such a crime. There is an important difference between disparaging a distant famous figure whose behaviour towards the public does not invite any kind of dialogue, and one who, by using sites such as Twitter, are stating implicitly that they are open to a more intimate relationship with their fans which doesn’t necessarily have to consist of one-way blanket admiration. And nor should it: reputations built on an unrealistic basis of devotion are easily toppled over and brought to less than nothing. This may not have been an issue during the old-time admiration of the 40s which stranded celebrities in a sea of admiration, but now we have long-lens cameras and that extreme of distance has found its antithesis in the invasive tabloid lambasting of Amy Winehouse et al. Such celebrities carry the enormous burden of keeping up appearances at all times, and if they perform some mistake or indiscretion which is made almost inevitable solely by dint of the pressures of being in the public eye, avid adoration leads to disproportionate feelings of disappointment.
However, celebrities could nip the problems which arise from over-inflated perceptions of their worth in the bud, by taking it upon themselves to inform the public that they are in fact far from perfect. Hopefully, it will be websites such as Twitter which provide the solution, by enabling celebrities to bypass the distorting mirror of the media and connect with their fans on a personal level. In this very incident, for example, Fry laid himself bare to the public to an unprecedented degree. He could easily have risen above the comment, but instead he let himself appear to the public as he really felt: vulnerable and hurt, even broadcasting his new-found conviction that he clearly wasn’t ‘good enough’ for Twitter users on their very website. Although clearly a painful episode for Fry, this kind of honest behaviour has helped to break down the hostile barriers between celebrities and their fans. It is only through recognition of shared humanity that each will learn to appreciate and value each other as people, not as towering entities who deserve to, or will sooner or later be, taken down a peg or two; or as an undifferentiated mass whose components are undeserving of individual attention. This will go some way to create an atmosphere of respect and friendship which is entirely absent from today’s media culture. Indeed, Fry himself seemed to quickly realise that he was in danger of undermining a valuable relationship by cutting himself off from the occasional criticism of his fans, acknowledging only a few hours after his hasty vow to leave Twitter that his assailant had ‘every right’ to call him boring.
All this is not to say that stars should be continuously shoved off their pedestals by a braying mob (and obviously there will be those who believe too much in their own hype and glory to humbly acknowledge their faults) but that we should welcome those such as Fry who chose to step down from them. This is not without its risks, as the recent Twitter furore shows; however, the benefits of really connecting with people, which can only come when you make yourself personally vulnerable to both praise and attack, will outweigh any occasional knocks to self-esteem.