{"id":4437,"date":"2009-04-17T23:55:41","date_gmt":"2009-04-18T03:55:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=4437"},"modified":"2009-04-17T23:55:41","modified_gmt":"2009-04-18T03:55:41","slug":"ashton-kutcher-and-the-evolution-of-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2009\/04\/17\/ashton-kutcher-and-the-evolution-of-media\/","title":{"rendered":"Ashton Kutcher and the evolution of media"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The standard response from many people on Twitter this week to the news that Ashton Kutcher wanted to get a million followers was thinly veiled (or not-so-thinly veiled) disgust. Long-time Twitter fans were outraged that anyone &#8212; let alone a two-bit TV actor &#8212; would be so blatantly egotistical, and trivialize such a great social-media tool in that way, just so he could get on the Oprah show. Shane Richmond <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.telegraph.co.uk\/shane_richmond\/blog\/2009\/04\/17\/oprah_winfrey_thwarts_ashton_kutchers_bid_to_be_twitters_biggest_tool\">said that it wasn&#8217;t clear<\/a> who was the bigger &#8220;Twitter tool,&#8221; Ashton or Oprah. All of these comments, of course, ignored the fact that Kutcher was using his campaign to raise money for malaria relief efforts, and has in fact raised a total of almost $1-million, according to <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/aplusk\/status\/1547997636\">a recent tweet<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>So Ashton is more or less using Twitter as the 21st-century version of Jerry Lewis&#8217;s telethon for muscular dystrophy. That isn&#8217;t the interesting thing about his use of the social network, at least as far as I&#8217;m concerned. Far from being just an egotist who wants to take advantage of a medium to promote himself &#8212; although there could well be an aspect of grandstanding to it, as there is for many people &#8212; it seems clear that the actor has thought fairly seriously about the implications of Twitter from a media-industry standpoint (my friend Andrew Cherwenka <a href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/andrew-cherwenka\/changing-the-face-of-medi_b_188039.html\">seems to agree<\/a>). And as a celebrity who is in the public eye almost all the time, he also has a somewhat unique take on the media industry and how it is being transformed.<\/p>\n<p><i>(read <a href=\"http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2009\/04\/what-ashton-kutcher-can-teach-us-about-the-evolution-of-media\/\">the rest of this post<\/a> at the Nieman Journalism Lab blog)<\/i><\/p>\n<div class=\"syndication-links\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The standard response from many people on Twitter this week to the news that Ashton Kutcher wanted to get a million followers was thinly veiled (or not-so-thinly veiled) disgust. Long-time Twitter fans were outraged that anyone &#8212; let alone a two-bit TV actor &#8212; would be so blatantly egotistical, and trivialize such a great social-media &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2009\/04\/17\/ashton-kutcher-and-the-evolution-of-media\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Ashton Kutcher and the evolution of media&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4437"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4437\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}