Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter Win Over CNN Showed us more than Yet Another Contest

LONDON - Comedian Ashton Kutcher has beaten American news giant CNN to become the first user to have a million people following his updates, or ‘tweets’ on social-networking website Twitter. The 31-year-old challenged CNN earlier this week to see who could be the first to attract a million followers and promised to donate 10,000 mosquito nets to charity for World Malaria Day if he won and 1,000 if he lost, while the broadcaster agreed to do the same, reports the Daily Mail online. But do we fail to see the real victory over a superficial one that has hypes and glories but promises of a different kind too? Wait a minute. Isn’t it that a single human being won over a media industry (considering they both are popular, that adjective is carefully kept aside)?

Kutcher emerged winner with nearly 2,000 followers more than CNN when he reached the one million mark in the early hours Friday.

‘Victory is ours,’ he told his Twitter followers, describing the moment as a ‘changing of the guard’ and added:

I think it’s a huge statement about social media for one person to actually have the ability to broadcast to as many people as a major media network

Indeed. I fail to see this with a short-sighted gimmick and actually think that a person (however popular, considering he is no Steve Jobs or Al Pacino) beating a major media house in a social media network is quite incredible. It actually speaks of a promise that  people had, have and will control what they like to see about media and not the vice versa as many may think.

We have shown the world that the new wave is here, it is present and it is ready to explode. We can and will create our media. We can and will edit our media. We can and will broadcast our media. We will censor our own media ourselves.

This quote sums it up. Being a media network ourselves, involvement and win of a human over an industry seemed really good.