When you hear the name Howard Stern, your mind should probably go one of two places: Anna Nicole Smith or pervert. Before I started dating my boyfriend, I thought Howard Stern was the nastiest, scummiest pervert on the planet. Although I am not completely convinced he is not disgusting, Thomas has introduced me to Stern’s talk show on Sirius radio. Yes, the show is outlandish and says the “f word” more times than I can count, but it is one of my new guilty pleasures (the other is watching all six seasons of Dawson’s Creek on DVD). We were listening to his show last night as we ran errands around town, and naturally Twitter came up for discussion on the show.
Stern totally bashed Twitter, and really just social media in general. Some highlights of his commentary:
- it’s all a waste of time
- if you are over 15, you shouldn’t be on these networks
- people put everything on a blog like people give a fu**
- go get a job
This bothered me because I think Stern is only looking at one side of Twitter. He made the comment that he had no interest in knowing that Miley Cyrus was eating a hamburger, but Twitter is not just for keeping up with celebrities. Sure people use it for this purpose, including myself, but others use it for its actual purpose: social networking. You can keep up with high school classmates, old teachers, family members and anyone else who you do not have direct contact with using these social media sites. And just so you know, Howard Stern, the PR professionals who use Twitter for its real purpose do have jobs… high paying jobs. It just goes to show that people who don’t understand these social networking sites have nothing better to do than to criticize them. What I find truly funny is that Stern is now on Facebook and Twitter. He has over 7,000 Facebook followers and almost 12,000 Twitter followers. He has even been updating his Twitter daily in the past few weeks. For a guy who doesn’t understand the point of Twitter, he seems to be using it quite a bit.
Don’t knock it until you try it, Howard. Maybe you can actually get some good publicity for once.
It is interesting that everyone who criticizes Twitter says that nobody wants to know what someone had for dinner. And while some people do really answer the question, What are you doing?, most people have moved away from that. Twitter is turning into a valuable social networking, information sharing (news too) tool.