![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
meta meta meta
Mar. 11th, 2012 03:20 pmgonna try and update the rec list before I have to go back to school (wah, wah, I DON'T WANT TO DO WOOOOOORK), but in the meantime, let's have a discussion about something I've been pondering lately!
has the emergence of Twitter (and Facebook, and all those other social media platforms where celebrities can talk directly to each other in public) fundamentally changed the nature of RPF? we used to be completely dependent on the reports of others about how celebrities felt about and interacted with each other, whether a gossipy anecdote on TMZ or an interview published in the Guardian. writers had no choice but to extrapolate huge things from small actions: a hug during a press junket, a quick kiss to celebrate a goal. but now we have all this source material available, only it isn't in a very convenient format, so I think most of us don't use it as much as we could. and of course there are problems of how seriously to take the persona a celebrity chooses to present; Misha Collins' twitter is obviously not a full portrait of Misha Collins, to give one glaring example. and Gerard Pique's facebook is not really helpful if you want to know what Gerard Pique is like, since it's clearly run by PR minions.
but with less famous figures (and now I'm getting into my own area of expertise), to what extent should we take things like Twitter conversations into account when thinking about RPF? Iker Muniain has however many thousands of followers, but I don't know how much he's thinking about them when he tweets David De Gea or Javi Martinez to say hi or let's go to the movies. is it fair to say that any publicly available information is part of their media persona, and therefore fair game? at what point does it become intrusive? and at the other side of the spectrum, at what point is it bad characterization to contradict information that is publicly available but maybe not commonly known? I try to research as much as possible to avoid the but that just isn't true reaction, but I still wrote a fic about Pique and Cesc trying to get Leo into social media when he's had a Weibo account since before either of them had heard of Twitter. he's obviously not the social media luddite I portrayed him as; I just didn't know that at the time.
I sometimes wonder if there's a generational gap between pre-Twitter and post-Twitter RPF writers. I fall very firmly into the post-Twitter party, so it's hard for me to judge. if you're writing about someone who has a twitter, I think you should read it, and I think conversations on twitter or facebook are a great way to figure out how two people interact. (and the absence of interaction when two people are both capable of interacting is a pretty good clue, too. anyone remember the kerfuffle over how Rafa never followed Novak on twitter?) it's kind of elitist to say that good characterization should take all available material into account, because not everybody has the time to do that sort of research, especially when it isn't in English, but I do side-eye characterization that is contradictory to what I know from doing research into how someone presents him/herself online, so...
well, maybe I'm just a snob! (no one is surprised.) what do you guys think about my latest crackpot theories?
has the emergence of Twitter (and Facebook, and all those other social media platforms where celebrities can talk directly to each other in public) fundamentally changed the nature of RPF? we used to be completely dependent on the reports of others about how celebrities felt about and interacted with each other, whether a gossipy anecdote on TMZ or an interview published in the Guardian. writers had no choice but to extrapolate huge things from small actions: a hug during a press junket, a quick kiss to celebrate a goal. but now we have all this source material available, only it isn't in a very convenient format, so I think most of us don't use it as much as we could. and of course there are problems of how seriously to take the persona a celebrity chooses to present; Misha Collins' twitter is obviously not a full portrait of Misha Collins, to give one glaring example. and Gerard Pique's facebook is not really helpful if you want to know what Gerard Pique is like, since it's clearly run by PR minions.
but with less famous figures (and now I'm getting into my own area of expertise), to what extent should we take things like Twitter conversations into account when thinking about RPF? Iker Muniain has however many thousands of followers, but I don't know how much he's thinking about them when he tweets David De Gea or Javi Martinez to say hi or let's go to the movies. is it fair to say that any publicly available information is part of their media persona, and therefore fair game? at what point does it become intrusive? and at the other side of the spectrum, at what point is it bad characterization to contradict information that is publicly available but maybe not commonly known? I try to research as much as possible to avoid the but that just isn't true reaction, but I still wrote a fic about Pique and Cesc trying to get Leo into social media when he's had a Weibo account since before either of them had heard of Twitter. he's obviously not the social media luddite I portrayed him as; I just didn't know that at the time.
I sometimes wonder if there's a generational gap between pre-Twitter and post-Twitter RPF writers. I fall very firmly into the post-Twitter party, so it's hard for me to judge. if you're writing about someone who has a twitter, I think you should read it, and I think conversations on twitter or facebook are a great way to figure out how two people interact. (and the absence of interaction when two people are both capable of interacting is a pretty good clue, too. anyone remember the kerfuffle over how Rafa never followed Novak on twitter?) it's kind of elitist to say that good characterization should take all available material into account, because not everybody has the time to do that sort of research, especially when it isn't in English, but I do side-eye characterization that is contradictory to what I know from doing research into how someone presents him/herself online, so...
well, maybe I'm just a snob! (no one is surprised.) what do you guys think about my latest crackpot theories?
