NET RESULTS:The brief 140-character format of a single tweet seems perfect for some celebrities dealing with personal traumas, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON

CELEBRITIES SURE know how to put the twit into Twitter.

I mean, come on: announcing your break-up with some other celebrity in 140 characters to a totally anonymous audience? Or tweeting away about it before you’ve even told your partner of your intention? Letting us all know you are filing for divorce? Joking (or having a tweet for tat) back and forth with your new ex-partner via a completely public social messaging format? How classy.

Then we are supposed to believe these people long for privacy, hate the paparazzi and the intrusion of the press and dislike how the public wants to know every detail of their personal lives? Or to look at it another way: the brief, 140-character format of a single tweet increasingly seems the perfect format to reflect the, um, great depth of character and emotion of some of these people when facing profound, deeply personal events in their lives.

Of course, it was really only a matter of time before Twitter turned into a public confessional for celebrities. As celebrities flooded into the Twittersphere, it was inevitable that they would have to cast widely to find things to hold their public’s interest – or, as the more sceptical might put it, confirm that, despite their complaints about intrusions and unfair media portrayals, they approach their own private lives with about the same level of style and grace as a cheap celebrity mag.

So why not share your heartbreaks with your one million best friend/followers? Thus we get Cheryl Cole recently announcing her divorce on Twitter, John Mayer tweeting his break-up with Jennifer Aniston (in an added layer of irony, the break-up apparently came because she was exasperated with how much time he spent on Twitter and that his tweets revealed that – doh! – he was busy having fun at times he told her he was hard at work). Then Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy split and, as one article put it, “revealed the break-up news on Twitter in separate tweets”.

As you would, I am sure, in your own life.

So how do leading men and ladies handle a Twitter split? Carrey tweeted: “Jenny and I have just ended our 5yr relationship. I’m grateful 4 the many blessings we’ve shared and I wish her the very best!” OK, for a moment try not to cringe here at the content, and instead consider that this farewell consists of only 126 characters. I confess I have very mixed feelings about a man who had 14 more characters at his disposal to be more eloquent about the ending of a five-year relationship and chose not to use them.

He could at least have spelled out “year” and “for” but then, maybe breaking up after half a decade is a pretty informal event for celebs.

More surprising to me (and, I am sure, to you) is the tweet itself. Maybe wishing someone the very best is a deeper and more emotional sentiment than I had realised and no longer has to be confined to school graduations, retirements and job rejection letters. There must have been many blessings indeed to evoke such a tender farewell.

But now for the Big Questions. Why would celebrities not just keep such highly private affairs of the heart, private? Or have your PR guru handle the press queries?

The old format for such things was for little to be said publicly while the PR spokesperson would fend off nosey reporters and present the agreed-upon tale of woe. When the necessity of a press interview eventually raised its ugly head – say, due to the demands of the launch of a new film or other project – the PR person would sternly tell journalists that they were not allowed to ask questions about the break-up/divorce/peccadillo.

Eventually, there might be an emotional interview in which the celeb finally revealed his or her feelings about the whole unfortunate situation and, with luck, a sympathetic article eventually might appear.

Now, the waiting public needn’t wait – if the break-up itself isn’t carried out live between the celebs through tweets in the first place, the announcements, explanations, fond farewells, or recriminations arrive in cyberspace soon after.

Social networking must create nightmares for the professional handlers of such people.

In the past, the PR folk had to worry mainly about what their charges said in an unguarded moment in an interview. Making public announcements had to be stage-managed by the PR person – there is, after all, an art and science to setting up a press conference or issuing a press release. Now, celebs just send off their 140-word personal thoughts in an ill-considered nanosecond and their observations live on forever online.

In many cases, it certainly gives us a more close to the bone view of their, er, substance. What can be the attraction though of such self-exposure for the celebs? Perhaps that, for the first time in their lives, they have direct access to an audience at all times, at all hours. They can say what they want, whenever they want, out of the control of their handlers, come what may.

All the same, I wonder if these people realise that most of the time they just end up looking and sounding like eejits. Or is that Tweejits?

Klillington@irishtimes.com

Blog: Techno-culture.com

Twitter: Twitter.com/klillington