"We have shown the world that the new wave is here," ... "It is present and it is ready to explode. You guys are all of it because I can't follow me"

—Ashton Kutcher

RACE TO 1M TWITTER FOLLOWERS

ASHTON KUTCHER [AplusK]     1 
CNN NEWSBREAK [CNNbrk]     0

Although I’m not sure Kutcher’s race against CNN was anything more than a digital gauntlet thrown from his iPhone, the challenge quickly garnered enough attention that CNN had to play.

On varying levels Kutcher’s social experiment was both a great success and a terrible failure. I genuinely applaud his PR savvy, placing himself at the top of the headlines of both mainstream news and the bourgeoning world of social media. (Yahoo! claims searches for Twitter over the past four months increased more than 5559% over the same time last year.) I can guarantee that his victory will be followed by appearances on talk shows, news interviews, social media chatter and blogs, like this one, dissecting the victory. (At the time this was written, there were 953,728 blog results and 5,778 news articles written within the last month regarding “Ashton Kutcher.”)

Fact is, the race had all the ingredients of prime-time FOX reality-TV show; massive audience participation, live broadcast over mainstream media (with millions more following the action online), perfectly topped-off by a nail-biting ending with other celebrities (Oprah, Puff Daddy, Larry King…) taking sides and mobilizing their bases. But what is genuinely sad is that Ashton won. As if mainstream news hasn’t already been kicked in the loins enough this year, the public shaming inflicted by the fact that the world is less interested in legitimate news than burning poo on celebrity doorsteps was just extra mayo for their shit-sandwich.

The idea and execution was no doubt brilliant; however, much more poignantly, the results do nothing but point an ugly mirror at ourselves.