p2pnet news view | Advertising:- Twitter is “The Few speaking to The Many,” says Simon Dumenco in Advertising Age.

“All the frothy utopian rhetoric of social networking aside, and regardless of the rise and fall of media conglomerates, big media is almost always about The Few profiting at the expense of The Many’s attention.”

It was Big News when Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter chirped a million tweets.

And when Oprah Winfrey became part of the flock …

Now, “When social media gets bloated, it can very easily revert to a pre-Web 2.0 paradigm: broadcasting,” says Dumenco.

Actually, there’s no such thing as “social media.” Nor is Fa$ebook a social anything. It’s an advertising company. Pure and simple. And Twitter was created as another online money-spinner that’s been building up creds and followers with the ultimate aim of going corporate, at which time it’ll become just another adco such as Google and, yes, Fa$ebook.

What’s the definition of someone who Twitters? S/he’s a Twit.

So what does that make Kutcher? And what did his tweeting really have?

The Advertising Age story breaks it down thus »»»

1 Kutcher’s win was a triumph for the little guy. Um, wrong. Kutcher ain’t no little guy.

2 [...] Just because Ashton Kutcher and CNN both use a free tool, Twitter, to promote themselves doesn’t mean they have “voice” parity, for chrissakes. If access to cheap or free digital megaphones were all that mattered, Estonian spammers would be more powerful than God.

3 Maybe he was just punking us? He drank his own Kool-Aid. But, as “commenter” [and p2pnet reader] Suzanne Lainson put it, “… people have had blogs for a while now. So the ability to bypass mass print, radio and TV has been with us for a long time. So what makes Twitter a better replacement of old media than anything else on the internet? … And the fact that everyone went on ‘Oprah’ to discuss Twitter seems to confirm that old media has clout’.”

4. Kutcher’s win was symbolic of a paradigm shift: the replacement of centralized, concentrated media power with a democratized two-way dialogue — after all, that’s what “following” and having “followers” is all about. As of this writing, Kutcher has 1,356,058 followers and is following 95 Twitter feeds. I rest my case.

Kutcher “did good by making a donation to No More Malaria to celebrate his win,” says Dumenco/Advertising Age, going on »»»

Sure, absolutely. As commenter Jean Levasseur, who said she doesn’t follow Kutcher but glanced through his tweets, put it, “I see him doing more than just inane babble. I see him trying to help people, donating to causes, giving poor people mosquito nets, encouraging philanthropy by engaging in it himself.”

But, hey, back up for a second! How do privileged Westerners like Kutcher tend to learn about the health crises in the Third World? From old-guard media companies like CNN! An old-guard media organization, that is, with hundreds of reporters around the world who sometimes literally risk their lives to bring us actual reporting about the sorry state of the world.

From, “Old-guard reporters who need and deserve to be overtaken by self-congratulatory Twittering celebrity jackasses, apparently,” says the story.

But this is the new is showing the old how the two can, and should, work together.

Old-time media (such as Advertising Age) have dedicated resources and staff while Twitterers are for the most part just ordinary people with zero resources, and who act as their own staff.

So OK, the corporate press corpse finds the news, or some of it. But it isn’t until people on Twitter and citizen journalists with their own sites, or posting on forums, or texting, or passing the word by IM or on chats, pick it up that it really gets disseminated.

And suddenly, the whole world knows about something which would otherwise have been confined to the readers of whichever print or electronic outlet originally carried it.

Isn’t this 10 degrees of integration — the old and the new working together to their mutual benefit?

And isn’t that the way it should be?

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Advertising Age – So It’s Official, Then: Ashton Kutcher Got Punk’d (Sorry, Twit!), April 24, 2009
part of the flock – Twitter`s newest tweeter: Oprah Winfrey, April 17, 2009