Since airing on Current TV nearly two weeks ago, the cartoon has been watched 1.2 million times on YouTube and spurred more than 3,500 comments online. It led pop star Katy Perry to opine about it on her blog, "This is pure real life truth. Swallow it!"
In the 4 1/2 -minute cartoon titled "Twouble with Twitters," a young man is aghast that his co-worker is unaware of Twitter and exhorts, "You are a young, hip, tech-savvy, 20-something and I will not let you turn into your father." The co-worker remains unimpressed and can't see the value in exchanging "detached, bite-sized yippety-yap" with people he barely knows. In a modern twist on The Emperor's New Clothes, the "Twitterverse" crumbles when the unimpressed co-worker informs all the Twitterers that they've been deluded into thinking Twittering is like real friendship.
Even one of the inventors of Twitter found it a riot.
"That video was hilarious!" Biz Stone, who co-founded Twitter in 2006, wrote in an e-mail response to a question about whether he'd seen it. "Very well done."
Josh Faure-Brac, 35, the animator who came up with the cartoon, can't get over the reaction. He scripted and drew the cartoon last fall in preparation for the recent launch of Current TV's "Super News" segment on Friday nights. He even feared Twitter would be passe by the time the cartoon aired. No such problem.
"Our timing couldn't have been better," Faure-Brac said. "The irony is that in making fun of Twitter, Twitter users have made me a Twitterlebrity."
His spot-on satire was based on his introduction to Twitter by an enthusiastic colleague.
"Her reaction was 'You don't know Twitter? It's amazing.' I signed up and started following people I work with and was instantly confused. It was people in short form telling me they ran out of Raisin Bran that morning or they were taking their dog for a walk. I don't know what to do with that information. What's cool about the Twitter community, though, is they seem very self-aware of the silliness of it. It's just good, clean fun."
Andrew L. Russell, a Johns Hopkins University doctoral graduate who teaches history at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., said ambivalence about "micro-blogging" echoes the empathy movie audiences felt 70 years ago when they laughed at Charlie Chaplin's slapstick depictions of the work world getting carried away with automation in the silent film Modern Times.
