ABSTRACT
In February 2009 television personality and self-confessed digital geek Stephen Fry sent the above ‘tweet’ from his mobile phone to 113,068 followers.2 However, due to blanket coverage of this ‘media event’ in the traditional press in the United Kingdom – leading newspapers from the Daily Mail to The Guardian, The Sun and The Independent all carried the story prominently – Fry’s near escape with boredom and bodily fluids was heard by many millions more. Together with the media coverage of the use of Twitter by ordinary people, bloggers and tourists during the Mumbai terrorist attacks a few months earlier, the attention of news outlets to the platform suggested that, as one user of social news networking site digg.com argued, Fry’s actions had ‘FINALLY [brought] Twitter into [the] British mainstream’.3 The place of social media in each event – the Mumbai terrorist attacks, the role of Twitter in mainstream media and its production of celebrity through coverage of the everyday – suggests that we are increasingly aware of the elision of the boundaries between the media world of professional journalists, media insiders and celebrities, and the ordinary world of users, bloggers, citizens and consumers.4
