Tweet mother of god: Celebrities on Twitter

The new source of cheap showbiz stories in the tabloid newspapers is Twitter. Why? Because celebrities – particularly Jonathan Ross (@Wossy) and Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) have decamped there (and, in Alan Carr’s case, camped it up there). All a hack has to do is follow their Tweets and they have an endless stream of title-tattle.

I only caught on a few weeks ago after using the Mr Tweet service to extend my Twitter network and it suggested I follow a Guardian technology journalist, Charles Arthur (@charlesarthur) who follows @Wossy (sorry to non-tweeters – Twitter has its own arcane argot).

I don’t know how I feel about celebrity tweeting. Not because I mind famous people doing it – Alan Carr’s tweets, for instance, are laugh-out -loud funny. No, what makes me cringe is the sheer amount of brown-nosing and ‘pay attention to me, me, me’ messaging from less exalted tweeters. There’s something a bit undignified about this. I guess it’s feeding celebrity egos, which always need a lot of sustenance, but its demeaning for the non-celebrities – like kids trying to get the attention of a distant parent who will never love them.

The biggest culprit on my follow list is one journalist (I shan’t name names) who seems to spend most of his working day trying to engage Jonathan Ross in tweet conversation. Give it up mate, he’s not going to write a column for you and 6000 other nobodies are trying to grab his attention.

One final argument against celebrities on Twitter: here’s a picture of Eddie Izzard in a fleece. It’s a bit like seeing Madonna in surgical stockings...