On Saturday, director Kevin Smith was thrown off a Southwest airlines flight in order to preserve the “safety and comfort of all customers,” i.e., for being too fat. He didn’t take it sitting down.
Smith tweeted,
with characteristic color,
his frustrations throughout the ordeal. Through the magic of Twitter,
Southwest responded,
contacted the director, and apologized
(but stuck to their “Customer of
Size” policies).
The Smith/Southwest fiasco is being touted
as the latest evidence in the awesome power of Twitter, the one playing
field that consumers can take on the Goliaths of the corporate world
and emerge victorious; it’s @ThatKevinSmith
vs. @SouthwestAir, and RTs are the weapon
of choice.
But
this notion is misguided at best. Kevin Smith is a powerful figure on
Twitter with more than 1.6 million followers. Kevin Smith’s tweets were
so effective because he’s Kevin Smith; the fact that Twitter provided
the bandwidth is incidental. Twitter is not a wholly democratic
shouting platform – it’s merely celebrity in a new medium. The average
Joe Beergut who tries to tweet his way into an airline’s good graces
isn’t likely to succeed.
But Kevin Smith’s indignation reverberated
loudly in the Twittersphere, and within hours, Southwest found itself
with a doozy of a PR problem. Perhaps, you might counter, Twitter is
important precisely because it gives such a forum to those that would
otherwise be denied. And that’s true, to an extent — it’s often useful for consumer complaints, for example. But this claim is a
far cry from empowering the regular individual. Here
is an unofficial list of the top Twitter users: you have to go way, way
down to find someone who isn’t a celebrity or a corporation. Yes,
Twitter does provide an open platform, even if it occasionally
resembles a verbal cage match with millions of rowdy participants. But
it’s dishonest to claim that the service is really anything more than
just that.
Twitter itself isn’t all-powerful. It merely empowers
a small, already-privileged group of celebrities who might, if
sufficiently pissed off, can really grab an airline’s attention. Now if it could just do something to make those seats a bit wider…
