Celebs feel the heat online
REPUTATIONS are built and destroyed on the internet. So building and maintaining an exquisite online profile is vital, particularly for celebs whose popularity so often hinges on how they’re portrayed in social media.
To monitor that profile there’s no avoiding Google searches. But for Hollywood stars the experience can be so traumatic that in recent weeks Charlize Theron admitted to Sky News that she doesn’t Google her name, adding: “When you start living in that world, and doing that, you start I guess, feeling raped.”
Her comment echoed that of fellow actress Kristen Stewart, who while describing how she feels when she sees paparazzi photographs of herself online, told Elle magazine: “I feel like I am looking at someone being raped.”
Stewart’s views on Twitter are equally negative. In an interview with Flaunt magazine she said: “Twitter f***s me over every day of my life.” There’s no denying that despite the 140 character limit, the power of the tweet is so great that many who once gauged their success by the number of records they sold or Oscars they won, now do so by the number of Twitter followers they have.
The fact that Katie Perry and Justin Bieber were the two most popular celebs on Twitter at the end of 2013, tells its own vacuous story, But that doesn’t stop leaders such as Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin and Pope Francis from entering the fray. If it’s a popularity contest — and it is in a way — then Putin’s media team needs to up its game. He has just 25,700 followers compared with Perry’s 53.4 million.
You know you're really on tour when: you have a debate over what day of the week it really is 😳
— KATY PERRY (@katyperry) May 20, 2014
Keeping ahead or even afloat in the celebrity online world is a tough call. The pressure on stars to communicate directly with fans through social network sites is perilous given that all it takes is one ill-thought out or ill-timed tweet to portray a perfectly decent celebrity as insensitive, foul-mouthed or worse.
That is precisely what happened to Ashton Kutcher. On learning that Penn State football coach Joe Paterno was fired, he tweeted that the firing was ‘in poor taste.’ On subsequently discovering that the dismissal followed a child-sex abuse allegation, he tweeted a picture of himself next to an ‘I’m with stupid’ sign and announced that he’d be leaving his future Twitter feed in the hands of his publicists.
One who won’t be taking any chances is Keira Knightly. The actress dipped a dainty toe into the Twitter playground by joining under a fake name, then deleted the account 12 hours later. And who could blame her? For celebs, Twitter can be a quagmire; a vessel, brim-filled with the self-promotional, often delusional rants of publicity seeking stars. Feast your eyes on this immodest tweet from Kanye West : “I open the debate… The 2nd verse of New Slaves is the best rap verse of all time….meaning … OF ALL TIME IN THE HISTORY OF RAP MUSIC, PERIOD.”
When West quit Twitter then returned two days later, he showed a glimpse of the love/hate relationship with the internet so many celebs enjoy. But he’s probably a huge fan of Instagram, given that a wedding snap of him kissing Kim Kardashian became the most liked photograph on that photo-sharing site and generated massive publicity for the pair.
Even the idle chat can be off. How else can we describe the “I hope she dies” response that Drake received from a random stranger having tweeted that his mother was undergoing surgery? The rapper also had to contend with a ‘The only person uglier than @drake is his mom,’ tweet from Amanda Bynes who sent that toxic missile to over 3 million followers. Of course the fact that she previously described Rihanna, Zac Effron and Miley as ‘ugly,’ hugely dilutes the insult, as does the fact that Drake’s mom is in fact pretty. But it was low all the same.
While Drake takes Twitter trolls in his stride, he’d doubtless agree with Gwyneth Paltrow who describes reading ‘nasty anonymous comments’ about herself online as a ‘very dehumanising thing.’
Perhaps that’s the reason why Winona Ryder told Jimmy Fallon that she’s terrified of what she quaintly describes as ‘the Googling.’
Internet ire is rampant among celebs. Vanessa Hudgens told People magazine that the internet ‘is ruining everyone.’ Megan Fox apologised on Facebook for closing her Twitter account. She said she did that because she ‘hates it’, then admitted: ‘Facebook is as much as I can handle.’
That’s more than can be said for George Clooney. While promoting his movie Up in the Air, the actor announced that he’d rather “have a rectal examination on live TV by a fellow with cold hands than have a Facebook page.”
Zadie Smith put it more eloquently. In a New York Review of Books appraisal of The Social Network, she wrote: “When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks.”
Launched the career of Paris Hilton and boosted that of Pamela Anderson.
When promoting products, Kim Kardashian commands up to $10,000 per tweet. Intriguingly, she’s limited to one such tweet per day.
All celebs nurture relationships with fans via Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Few do so better than Rihanna, Lady Gaga.
When James Franco hit on a 17 year-old-girl on Instagram, his first attempt at damage-control was to take to Twitter to ask parents to keep their teens away from him.
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