The Tools Powering Celebrity Feuds (Kimye vs. TSwift Edition)
Let’s talk about one of the greatest celebrity feuds of all time and what it tells us about platforms.
COMING UP
- Kim K. and TSwift’s Creative Multi-Platform Shade
- The Messy Mechanics of Mobile Distribution
- Why We (and Everyone Else) Love Apple’s Notes
This is excerpted from The Shed, where we discuss the tools we use to tell stories. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter and catch our archives on Medium and TinyLetter.
I’ma Let You Finish, But…
ICYMI, the age-old Kanye West vs. Taylor Swift feud (has it really been seven years since the infamous VMAs that set this whole thing in motion?) took a surprising turn Sunday night when Kim Kardashian West — Yeezy’s wife and staunch defender — set the internet on fire by posting a Snapchat story. In that story: a series of videos showing that TSwift may have been stretching the truth when she slammed Kanye for name-dropping her without permission in the song “Famous” earlier this year. Twitter blew up, TSwift responded, other celebs weighed in. Things got messy, y’all.
While we love a good celeb feud just as much as the next person, the most fascinating aspect of this convoluted saga may be how it unfolded across platforms. Here’s the breakdown:
In other words:
Social Gesture Deficiency
In light of the news, Andréa López (aka @bluechoochoo of the wonderful newsletter 20,000 leagues under the web) posted a fantastic thread analyzing how 🔥 hot items 🔥 posted OFF Twitter still have to spread and distribute ON Twitter to achieve scale and virality.
We put together a handy Storify containing the best of López’s tweets and replies from that thread, but here are some of her observations in a nutshell:
Instagram and Snapchat both lack social gestures, namely resharing. So when big things happen on those platforms, the buzz takes place somewhere else. When Beyonce suddenly announced her album on Instagram in December 2013, news spread on Twitter and Tumblr; without a native regram feature, López wrote, “Instagram is not its own distribution.”
Same thing with Snapchat, which started as more of a production tool and a messaging app than a publisher and social network. Kim Kardashian’s story was created on Snapchat (and probably earned her more than a few followers that night), but there’s no way to talk about it on the platform, so the story spread like wildfire on Twitter, instead.
For now, Snapchat is still enjoying its “intimacy honeymoon,” as López puts it, but that will come to an end as Snapchat must gradually adopt more traditional social networking mechanisms (see: Memories). Only then can it live in the final “Platonic ideal” state of “essential utility.”
Our Next Issue Will Be All Notes Screenshots
Now for some ruminations on how we produce, publish, and distribute text on social platforms:
Huh. That is quaint. And it’s not the first time a public figure has used Notes to broadcast their thoughts, either. Jezebel’s Bobby Finger recently highlighted numerous celebrities who have issued statements, apologies, and accusations on the ubiquitous iOS app: Amy Schumer, Fifth Harmony, Demi Lovato, Ariana Grande — heck, even the NFL (note the first reply: “does the NFL really use the iPhone notes app for releases?” 😂).
Why is this rudimentary method a thing, even among the rich and famous (and followed)? NYMag’s Brian Feldman wrote in the recent Select All article “Was Taylor Swift Betrayed by Her Own Notes App?” (emphasis ours):
“Notes statements are ubiquitous on celebrity social media, as the podcast Who? Weekly has noted often. They’re one of the true joys of the post-tabloid age — a perfect example of the democratization of social media, in which even the rich and glamorous are forced to use the same cobbled-together kludges as the rest of us when they need to publish a lot of text to a site like Instagram, which favors the visual, or Twitter, which has a character limit. Screenshots of Notes are quick to write, assemble, and distribute — which means their textured-paper aesthetic is often the sign of quickly composed PR triage.”
Basically, it boils down to workflow. In our mobile world, the smartphone is the tool of the trade. For production purposes, that means a camera, essentially. We use our cameras to take photos (us normals), capture text (celebrities on Notes), and even videotape existing footage on another screen (Kim K. and her cinematic masterpiece of a Snapchat story).
Images are the one form of content that can easily and quickly be created and uploaded anywhere — on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and even Snapchat now. Distribution is possible with images in a way that it isn’t with text. You could download Medium so you can painstakingly type up a long essay, tweet up a storm that will appear in out-of-order chunks on people’s timelines, or write a lengthy Instagram caption that can’t be pinned or shared — or you could just open up Notes, do your thang, post on your platform of choice, and let distribution take care of the rest.
What tools do you use to produce and distribute content (and are you #TeamKimye or #TeamTaylor? 😉)? Let us know by commenting or tweeting @KnightLab, thanks!
– Your friends at The Shed
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