Character

Twitter is fast becoming home to people using the service for vastly different reasons than I. I’ve no issue with it. I followed Tony Hawk for a day.

But the recent celebrity rush on top of the media nods has given twitter the kind of credibility that can suck in the unwilling. So we get these official accounts for celebrities and politicians keeping us up to date by way of a savvy intern.

Like U.S. Senator John Thune, Republican, South Dakota, whose account gave us the following blip earlier tonight:

Introduced bill to require admin to pay down debt using $ repaid by TARP recipients. Hope to prevent Pres from creating rolling slush fund.

I look at this and think: who wrote this? Was it the Senator himself or the savvy intern who convinced him of twitter’s credibility.

I’m going with the latter. I saw those twitpics last week. Noobs in suits don’t twitpic the first day they’re on twitter. Interns do. And you just let your ghostwriter define you in terms of that intangible event you hope to prevent when you’d have defined yourself in terms of what you actually do.

My point is this: do it yourself. Be genuine. You might be able to find a ghostwriter who understands or even shares your political views, but you’re going to struggle finding someone who shares your character.

As luck would have it, twitter has a million examples of genuine participants, beginning with Shaq and ending with the guy twittering with no regard to whether or not you know his full name.

So, apologies to all for the offstage lecture. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before it’s announced that Mr. Thune will be attending the next twitter meetup. Maybe we’ll get new evidence. Maybe I’ll argue that ghostwriters have initials that can be typed in for the fake stuff.

We’ll see.