LOST on Twitter: NOT a move affiliated with the show!

Breaking news!

By following an incoming link to yesterday’s post, I have discovered that the LOST characters on Twitter are part of a kind of role-playing project started on a forum at SpoilerTV.co.uk, here is the post:

Oceanic Six Twitter Project

by Gideon on Tue Dec 30, 2008 9:28 pm

All right guys, I know I’m new around here, but I had a pretty cool idea that I think some of you may want to participate in. Essentially, Twitter accounts will be created for the Oceanic Six (minus Aaron, obviously), and we’ll use them to follow the events off-island in this season as if we were those characters. Need for information? Keep reading!What’s Twitter?
Twitter is a social network/micro-blogging service that is absolutely free to sign up for. You can see the example I’ve set up here. The amount of characters you can input for one “post” is limited to 160. This means sometimes you have to be smart to say all you want to say.

Who can participate?
Anyone can participate! Just post here with the character you’d like to post as, and I’ll help you set up an account if you need any help. I would like for you to make a commitment to this, however, and continue with your character at least until he or she makes it back to the island.

So what/when do I post?
Just post whatever happens to the character on the show! Act as if you are the character, not yourself commenting on the character. Think of it as role-playing. You can post whenever you like, whether on Wednesdays after the show or any time throughout the week, but please do not post more than once a day, simply because people will be “following” you and we don’t want to flood and annoy them. Also, please post at least once a week.

What can I use to post?
You may use the Twitter website, or any of the downloadable clients.

If enough people are interested, you might also be able to create an account for anyone else off island (particularly Ben, Desmond, and Widmore).

Any questions I forgot, or anything you need clarified? Just post!

You can go on to read people volunteering to post as the characters and some discussion of how it will happen. At one point someone questions whether or not they should post a disclaimer about what they are doing and I actually really wish they had. Another person replies that they think people are smart enough to know that the actors from the show wouldn’t have time to be on Twitter.

(and they were right, I didn’t think that.)

I had thought (assumed, hoped) that it was an official move actually affiliated with the show, to build up buzz over the next few weeks and maybe reveal some fun clues. I didn’t think Matthew Fox was twittering as Jack Shepherd or anything THAT specific, but I did think it was people from ABC. Potentially from the writing team of the show. Maybe that is naive of me, but they have done such a fantastic job with the website (I posted a while ago about the book club) and marketing, it didn’t seem beyond the realm of possibility.

And I have to admit, I’m a bit disappointed. I don’t think it is necessarily deceptive. I feel kind of silly that it didn’t occur to me that these could be fake – I guess since it coincided with a lot of other buzz and marketing coming up about the premiere in a few weeks. And it isn’t a bad concept, per se, crossing fan fic with social networking and role-playing. It’s just a concept that doesn’t actually interest me at all.

So I won’t be following them anymore. And unfortunately, it’s safe to say there will not be any actual clues or spoilers associated with these accounts.

Tags: geeking out, LOST season five

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 at 9:51 pmand is filed under film & television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “LOST on Twitter: NOT a move affiliated with the show!”

Dreyesbo Says:
January 7th, 2009 at 1:01 am
I’m sorry. I was the one that wished to make a disclaimer. We never pretended to be something we weren’t, and with this kind of accounts around (@darthvader, or even @benlinus and @keamy during Season 4)…

Sorry to read you won’t follow.

Reply
bonnie Says:
January 7th, 2009 at 1:40 am
Hey,

No need to apologize! I agree that you never pretended to be something you aren’t! And I do know there are many more accounts like this. (I’m a big fan of Firefly/Serenity as well, and there have been twitter accounts for those characters for ages! I also don’t follow those.)

The reason I am not following is not because I felt duped, because I didn’t really, just disappointed that it wasn’t what I thought it was. (and that is as much about my assumption/hope as anything else!) It’s really just because I’m not so interested in fanfic/roleplaying. I would much rather hear people’s ideas and theories and discussions as themselves, instead of portraying the characters.

I hope you will carry on with your project and have lots of fun doing it! And I know you will have many people following you and enjoying it. I just wanted to post to clear up any misimpressions I had given with my previous blogging about it.

-b

Reply
Dreyesbo Says:
January 7th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
Okay, thanks for understanding Disclaimer added, though

Reply
James Says:
January 7th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
With it being spoilertv I’m sure there will be some spoilers

Reply