Watch out Ashton and Oprah: a Massachusetts cat named Sockington is on your tail.
Sockington – Socks to his friends – is the latest Twitter sensation, collecting more than 500,000 followers in the last three months, TechCrunch and others note.
That’s not quite up to Twitter King Ashton Kutcher’s 1.8 million followers or the 1 million-plus reading Oprah Winfrey’s messages of 140 characters or less. But it’s not bad for a feline whose updates include gems like, “TRAFFIC IS ALL JAMMED UP IN THE KITCHEN-DINING ROOM INTERCHANGE taking a detour through laundry room bypass.”
Sockington’s tweets can be put on T-shirts, we learn from his website, presumably run by his human friend, Jason Scott.
The Sockington phenomenon – his followers are known as the Socks Army – is the latest example of Twitter being used as a tool of the whimsical and absurd. The idea of a Twittering cat also is a commentary, intended or not, on the changing nature of celebrity and fame in the Internet age.
Are Sockington’s posts – like “watching cat tv in living room OH BOY SQUIRREL RUNS ACROSS ROAD SHOW this is either going to be comedy or horror HOORAY IT'S COMEDY” – really any more or less worth reading than such Kutcher musings as, “I wonder if people need less sleep in space. It seems sleep is gravity's vaccine.”?
Twitter is in the midst of a growth spurt, not only because of Kutcher, Winfrey and other celebrity adapters, but because its immediacy and conciseness seem custom-built for a generation raised on texting. Facebook and other social networking services are looking to the Twitter model.
A demand for Twittering skills is turning up in job descriptions. Corporations are using the microblogging service as a business-building device. Sports and entertainment figures use Twitter to communicate directly with fans. Even the White House tweets.
Twitter can be a powerful communications tool that imparts news and useful information -- or, as Patrick Swayze can attest, it can be misused to spread false information at warp speed. Tweets also can be a means to trumpet the useless, silly and mundane. Quality control comes by wisely choosing whom to follow.
The White House, by the way, has amassed about 135,000 followers in less than a month, compared to Sockington’s 520,000. Look like he’s still the top cat – for now.
Hester is founding director of the award-winning, multi-media NYCity News Service at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism. He is the former City Editor of the New York Daily News, where he started as a reporter in 1992.
