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Days
are gone when the paparazzi stalked celebrities
on their whereabouts and hideouts to feed the
ever news-hungry media and the celebrity-starved
public. Welcome to the digital era, where celebrities
do it all themselves. They blog, tweet and write
columns in popular websites and magazines. Even
better, they post instant updates on their day-to-day
activities on Twitter, the recent fad among the
net savvy celebrities. Now, how cool is that?
The entire world (read India) dropped its jaw
in surprise when the whole of Bollywood took to
blogging - mostly after Aamir Khan felt he was
bitten by the writing bug and felt the need to
let the world know that he has a dog named after
the King Khan. A slew of other celebrities followed
suit from Amitabh to Salman.
What followed is a bombardment of news source
for magazines and an excessive coverage of celebrity
opinion about public and political matters. Following
the racist attack of Indian students in Australia,
Amitabh asked his
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followers whether he should accept the honorary doctorate
conferred upon him by the Queensland University of Technology,
Brisbane. That he refused the honor is history. His
blog enabled him to voice an opinion almost instantly
rather than waiting for a media-house mouthpiece to
do that on his behalf.
Since most of these celebrity blogs are not copyrighted,
updates appearing on them are splattered all over the
media as soon as they appear. Evidently a painless way
to source news.
But of late, even blogs seem to be losing sheen as microblogging
is taking over slowly. As against expressing views and
opinions as page-long articles in blogs, microblogging
lets the user post the same in the form of one to two
liner updates. Much easier and less time consuming without
any complex hassles of writing, posting and publishing;
microblogging works instantly. And what’s more,
that’s what the whole world is talking about now
– Twitter.
If you read Mallika gushing about Usher and how handsome
he is in the newspapers and internet magazines, be enlightened
that the news is taken straight out of her Twitter page.
Being the net savvy bombshell she is, Mallika gives
the entire world a glimpse into her daily life in the
form of Tweets. She also recently confessed of a letter
of recommendation written by Jackie Chan for her US
work visa, on her Twitter page.
Hollywood, in its entirety, is reeling under the Twitter
fever with film celebrities and even politicians having
a profile of their own. President Obama used Twitter
as a part of his election campaign during the presidential
elections. And Ashton Kutcher uses it to tell the world
that he’s scared of his wife Demi Moore’s
voodoo doll collection. Perspectives.
Bollywood celebrities other than Mallika who are spotted
at the Twitter space include Gul Panag, Preity Zinta,
Shahid Kapoor and Purab Kohli. The Zinta girl has more
than 2000 followers while Gul is a regular in providing
everyday updates starting from her day at work to her
i-phone’s technical glitches.
Of our very own tinsel townies, Madras Maestro AR Rahman
is on Twitter although he doesn’t seem to be very
active, his last tweet being on May 29.
But the other celebrities down south seem to prefer
to keep a rather low profile. Apart from the few Face
Book and Orkut profiles, of few celebrities that are
blocked for outsiders other than friends, including
Arya, Dhanush, Trisha, Padmapriya, Ileana and Gazaala
nobody has showed any interest whatsoever in either
blogging or tweeting away in cyberspace. Well, for now,
let’s think ‘may be they will soon catch
up with the rest of the world’.
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