Unsurprisingly, yet another South Park episode has made the news recently. And as usual, the comments have ranged from praise and approval to shock (and even subtly worded death wishes?).
In pure South Park fashion, “Dead Celebrities” is a controversial mix of media/social critique and relentless celebrity-bashing, in shape of a Sixth Sense parody.
This time, the reason for media commentary is the daring politically incorrectness featured in the episode, which included a dead Michael Jackson finally realizing his dream of becoming a white girl in his afterlife and American TV salesman Billy Mays selling a washing product for blood-stained underwear (without mentioning a rather tactless appearence of David Carradine in stockings with a rope around his neck).

Parker and Stone’s fine-tuned postmodern pastiche formula didn’t fail to amuse and get the usual media coverage, but fan reviews are kind of mild and the accuses of poor taste/bad writing are no news. Most likely, there will hardly be any reference to “Dead Celebrities” in your newsfeeds next week.
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“My nephew has HDADD: Hi-Definition Attention Deficit Disorder. He can barely pay attention, but when he does it’s unbelievably clear.” – Steven Wright

Since Twitter came out it was pretty obvious it was something else. Its minimal, quasi-zen approach (short haiku-style posts, ultra-light interface, a very “carpe diem” real-time nature) won many users over. But why would such a restrictive, limited social network become so popular? There are so many more things you can do via MySpace or Facebook, where you can easily embed everything possibly embeddable.
Nonetheless, although Mark Zuckerberg’s well-tested money-making machine is still bigger than Twitter (I’d go as far as to say it’s almost necessary for internet users), the social colossus has been learning a lot from its younger, smarter brother.
The “twitterification” of Facebook has raised some perplexities and the opening of that once closed and well-guarded environment wouldn’t necessarily be a good thing for their business. I like the definition of Facebook as a “gated community” (read here): you can easily do everything you need on the internet inside of it and forget about the outside web. This has been part of the network’s strenght in the past, one more reason why it is both scary and addictive.
While Twitter’s openness (making information public and searchable in real-time) has definitely played a major role in the social network’s rise to pop culture phenomenon, replacing Facebook as the next internet thing, I think there is another factor worth analyzing (and no, it’s not journalist A.D.D.).
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It all started by doing what every active internet user does once in a while: egosurfing (or something like that, I wasn’t looking for my own blog – this one here – but for the one I work for).
I googled “yskira.com” and found, at the 8th position on the first result page, a link claiming to be a blog review. The url name read no less than “topblogreview”, so I was intrigued and clicked in hope of a nice comment. It turned out the comment was far more than nice, and even enthusiastic would be a euphemism:

Every post available in the blog is neat, no dirt in terms of inappropriate photos or anything. The articles titles makes you want to read more. I enjoy the widespread reach this site has in terms of its readers from over the world. It’s like the writer has eyes of a hawk not at all missing any point. As soon you read a post you can’t wait to read another one for the tips given. Once you start reading you could not give over.

First of all, such grand terms are so fired up they sound ironic, and second there is no reference whatsoever to what the blog is about. (more…)