You don’t need to tweet [publicly] for me, Richard Armitage
I believed you in December 2012 when you said you “didn’t get” twitter, and I personally think that if you wanted to be tweeting to fans, you’d have been doing it by now. (My judgment is out on whether you tweet privately in a hidden way.) Whether you tweet isn’t going to affect my relationship with you much — unless you say horrible things. Which I don’t suppose is likely. Still, other people have made the point that tweeting effectively is an art that has to be learned. When you say “we” are thinking about it, I hope that means someone who understands social media.
I have to admit, though, that I wonder what the effect on fans would be if you tweeted. Not in terms of our responses to you, but in terms of our responses and behavior to each other. Would people flame each other at the same rate in arguments about you if we believed “you” were present or potentially observing?
It’s an interesting question, given that no doubt there is already someone watching twitter “for you.”
Me + Richard Armitage 
While I enjoy the thought of him being more “accessible” (meaning I could tweet him when the thought comes in the hope that he could possibly read it and smile) I can’t see him on Twitter much. I like his letters to the “RArmy”,they are a nice bridge between us and him in an unobtrusive (to him) way and I hope we get more over the years.
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I hope people would tweet nice things to him!
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oh same here! I know I would, but some people can overstep boundaries and get crass so, I’m worried that would happen.
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I’m not hugely worried about that (or that he would be harmed by it). I’m sure that happens to everyone who tweets (it happens to me). In essence, if you make yourself available on twitter, you make yourself available to whatever people say. He would have to learn to ignore it, of course.
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###################### I have to agree with you. I don’t need Richard to tweet really. That is up to him anyway but I think that he values his privacy more and to a degree Twitter does take some of that away. I didn’t understand Twitter when it started but it has improved somewhat. Still I’m not sure it would be a good thing for him. I’m sure that his agent keeps track of what is said there and on Facebook or has someone to do that. No big deal. It would be nice to talk directly with him but there are thousands who feel the same way and would he feel that he has to answer everyone? Can’t do that of course but he has always been very conscious of what his fans think, maybe too much so really.
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yeah, I think I am potentially ambivalent with anything that would make him think *more* about fan reactions to him. The point of Twitter though is also for potentially employers to measure the level of general interest in him outside of his core fan audience.
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To tweet, or not to tweet, that is the question.
I don’t get twitter either, but it hasn’t been that long ago that I didn’t get FB. Both are good marketing tools though.
How does one tweet privately?
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you can set it up so that only certain people can see your tweets (“protected tweeting”).
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If you are a famous person, don’t you receive hundreds of tweets a day? So wouldn’t you have “people” to manage it for you? And probably write things for you? Do most actors use Twitter as a publicity tool or something else? Just wondering.
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It would depend on the person and their level of celebrity, no doubt. I’m fairly sure the other dwarf actors don’t have people managing their tweets. In contrast with someone like Justin Bieber, who gets millions of tweets a day, he periodically peeks in and tweets himself and that’s what fans are waiting for … hanging on his words.
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If he wanted to tweet he would have done so by now. I hate the thought of him doing it at the behest of some publicity person who says he must in order to keep up with Hiddleston. I think being a man of mystery has done him proud so far so i hope he doesn’t go down this avenue.
I tend to think it won’t bring out the best in the more competitive fans either.
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I wonder about fan reactions, as well. But my main issue isn’t fans tweeting him or him tweeting him back (he will have to deal with that as he can) but the flames fans subject each other to on twitter. (It’s part of why I mainly use twitter to broadcast my post and only occasionally for conversations). If his “presence” on twitter would calm that, well, I would welcome that.
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I hadn’t thought of it as a positive – i was thinking of the jealousy can can erupt within fandoms. But you are right – his ‘presence’ might make things calmer.
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I’m sure there would be plenty of jealousy felt, too, about responses or non-responses, but I would be less worried about that specifically insofar as I think any jealousy experienced would not be likely to be broadcast *on* twitter, i.e., notionally “in front of” Armitage. Maybe I am wrong about that. But fan dustups where I don’t see them don’t need to distress me 🙂
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Hmmm… well i think we are getting into dangerous territory here. i didn’t see what happened recently but it still hurt people i care about and cast a pall over our community, so i don’t agree with the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ theory.
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But if you didn’t know about it at all, it wouldn’t bother you, how could it? I suppose there’s the problem of whether jealous fans hash it out in private or if they just move the battle somewhere else where Armitage is not notionally present (which is certainly possible).
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I was thinking of the latter. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over what was said in private but once it goes onto the www it becomes unacceptable.
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If he did start to tweet, given my fourth wall issues, that would present other dilemmas for me — but I think they would be solely limited to me. Other fans don’t seem to be as interested in the fourth wall as I am.
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Considering how excited i got when Robin Ellis responded to my suggestion he use a blow torch on his fritatta (on his food blog), i’m not sure where i stand on the 4th wall!
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I’m pretty much done tweeting celebs. I tweeted all the dwarves on twitter after TDOS to say I’d enjoyed the film, which was okay, because I didn’t get a response, but I also tweeted Jed Brophy once to say “thanks for the really informative interview” and he tweeted me back to say “thanks” and it took me hours to recover from the nausea. I honestly never thought he’d answer back. I limit myself now to favoriting or retweeting those guys’ tweets.
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I want to stress that this is my issue, not theirs. If I don’t want to risk getting an answer I need not to tweet them.
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Yes – i get that. I’ve never asked for an autograph from RA (or anyone else) and when he came to Sydney i was comfortable just sitting back and observing. I think that’s why i was so taken aback when he took a wrong turn and ended up so close. But he still never saw me (and i was able to observe more closely) so it was okay.
Reading that back, i sound like a stalker!
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would any real stalker spend so much time talking about it in public? 🙂 that applies to me as well as you 🙂
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oh, and re: Hiddleston imitations — I wonder about that question A LOT. If he is aware of what fans say, there is such a groundswell of admiration for Hiddleston’s playfulness, and I can imagine it would be hard to resist the temptation fully to imitate that. There’s a group of fans who’d love that behavior from Armitage but another group who’d equally find it repellent. The big question of course, is not what people who are already fans think but those who are not …
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Good point. Hiddleston left me cold until i saw him on Graham Norton being playful and that won me over. But at the same time we know that some fans find RA being a dork really difficult – i like dorks but i had a reaction to him pretending to hang himself with his tie, and the likelihood of gaffes on an instant medium like twitter has got to be higher. Or am i being naive about how ‘spontaneous’ it is?
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I’d like to see Richard Armitage in ways that appear comfortable on him, and I think he’s not inherently Mr. Gregariously Playful in the way that Hiddleston is. (And I wonder if Hiddleston’s fans would have had the extremely negative reaction that some Armitage fans have to watching Armitage clown — I think not, b/c Hiddleston’s fans love his clowning.) That was one thing that this Anglophile Channel interview underlined for me.
And yes, the potential for gaffes and anger on Twitter is *huge*. There’s also no real filter. If you’re tweeting and you make a misstep the stream of rage turns directly in your face.
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I’d have gone off Hiddleston too if he’d done the tie hanging thing. That wasn’t clowning – it was poor taste.
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can we call it clowning in poor taste? I didn’t care for it, either, but it was done in a particular context (MTV) and with the intent to be funny.
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I agree . It sounds like a publicity tool, so i hope he doesn’t go down this road
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Two posts in a day that I have to reply to! I’m so interested that none of his fans want him to tweet. Is this unusual? I that more about who he is, or more about the fans themselves (I know it’s at least a bit of both)? I believed him in 2012 that he “didn’t get twitter” but since then he’s spent more time with fellow actors who do, and a couple of times he has appeared in pics on their feed. Perhaps he is more open to the idea, sees that it can be done in ways that isn’t about opening your whole life to the public eye. No?
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That is a good idea. But although it’s a smart move to go on twitter and be more present to the public, it was an important insight he used “we” and not “I” (thinking of “driven by motives/pushed”).
I think the twitter experiment will depend on how he will deal with it – will he be the one who tweets (like the dwarfs) and sends out more “private” stuff – and I cannot see that right now – or will the account be used for well-wishes to his fellow actors, latest news on his projects, along with the undertone of “Hey, Hollywood, I’m here”?
But I see his statement as a teaser to part 2. Maybe he will explain more tonight.
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I think there are plenty of fans who want him to tweet. I’ve seen at least two posts encouraging him to do it.
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..and not for me , but if he cares for a new audience he might need to do it.
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yeah. He doesn’t need to do it to make me happy, but he should do what he thinks he needs / wants to do.
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Have you read judiang’s (JAGrant’s) The Man series, in particular “Social Media”? LOL
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🙂
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I haven ‘t! Could you provide a link ?
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http://www.jagrant.com/watcher/social-media/
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I guess Mr. Armitage would be more comfortable with the letters he wrote than with twitter and i’d rather have him immersed in his acting than worry about twitter. Marketing tool, ok, but only if he can use it on his own terms and i doubt that this is very likely to happen ‘^^. I imagine he could even have fun with it, if used well.
I’m sad that some people don’t get his dorkiness. Armitage would be different if he didn’t have this side. Way too serious.
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the nice thing about the “messages” is they can be composed very carefully — twitter does invite to spontaneous remarks.
I don’t disagree with you but I think there are / were a lot of people who really appreciated his apparent inability or lack of desire to play games and who have been somewhat stunned by the emergence of a sort of juvenile facet of his personality in the last year or so. I personally could have it either way, in the sense that I’m interested in watching what I see — whatever it is.
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that’s true. thoughtfulness is still possible though if done consciously.
lol, it just stunnes me that i had a gut feeling that he has this much playfulness (which can be used for dorky action but not only, see below) and others didn’t and are now surprised. i love to see him like this and even if it’s a mixture of genuine and extra goofy armitage, i still think it’s more his true self than ever before. being critisized for being and showing who you are is just sad. i know that it can look like drunk to behave enthusiastically or dorklike but i believe i can tell the difference, except somebody is only slightly tipsy, then it might get difficult to distinguish.
i think the playfulness could play 😉 heavily into his layered acting, in a non-humorous manner though. playfulness requires a level of uncertainty about the next action and an openness to that uncertainty. the many different emotions shown by armitage in a few seconds might require just that i think because of the fluidity and uncertain paths of emotions, even if only acted. i know i throw a lot in here but the brooding feeds off the playfulness too, not knowing when the volcano of emotion bursts…the thing which makes him so potentially dangerous. i hope i didn’t loose you here.
and then there are the characters he played, which have more than just a streak of playfulness. gisborne, harry kennedy, ricky deeming, john mulligan and maybe others i forgot. characters like porter, lukas or monet have it too but much less.
i wonder if mr. armitage still has his moments in interviews where he smiles to himself or if he just lets it out in a dorky comment or something similar.
i don’t know nothing about mr. armitage, this is just what i observe and conclude. i just can’t help but smiling when i see his confidence not only on but also off screen combined with that playful dorky behaviour. no wonder i become a bit touchy about it. i tried hard not to hurt any feelings though, sorry if it happened nevertheless, it isn’t meant that way.
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I’ve spent a lot of time around drunken people in my life (not by choice) — and I didn’t for a second think he was drunk in this interview. So I was shaking my head about that, mostly in confusion. One may not like a less serious Armitage but the interpretation of intoxication to me says a lot about the person who makes it.
Someone said to me, off blog, that *assuming* these playful / “dorky” / less serious moments are reflections of something closer to his real personality than the way we oftne see him, it’s unfortunate that every time he shows that stuff he takes a bit of a blow, because it will make him less likely to show these pieces of himself. I honestly don’t know enough to answer that question with anything beyond speculation, but I would say that the identity struggles of some fans are so intense that they would, indeed, if there were a conflict between the two possibilities, prefer him to be who they believe him to be than who he is. I tend to think the dilemma is not *so* severe — that any public manifestation of oneself that one performs involves both “genuine” elements and things one knows one’s audience wants to see. But I do assume that people who are not faking it are happier, and I wish him every happiness.
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I can only agree to all that you’ve said here.
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P. S. After seeing the tweets of Adam & Dran from LA, I wonder if they were Armitage’s “other commitments” on that day…
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Possibly. Or maybe he didn’t want to go — we’ve never had any indication that he likes that sort of event especially well — or didn’t have access to tickets.
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I don’t do Twitter and find it kind of invasive–I’d just as soon he didn’t.
Incidentally, I love watching him clown and let a bit of his lighter side show–for me, we don’t get to see enough of it.
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well, presumably no one would force fans to read his tweets.
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*giggle*
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I’m on Twitter but I never bother to actually use it so if RA himself started tweeting I guess I would start to pay attention to the service. I’m personally hoping he won’t since it’s one less social media site to track.
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having rewatched that piece today, I think the risk of it happening anytime soon is very low. I would upgrade it if he gets cast in a big blockbuster of some kind, you can kind of see it then, he’d have a stronger immediate interest in self promotion in that case.
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He doesn’t seem like a social media type. I’d prefer he stay off of it. I enjoy the mystery that surrounds him. I really don’t want to know that much about him. I like hearing about the projects he’s working on. And I love hearing about his acting and creative process.
I follow an actor on FB who really embraces it. Posts pics of his baby and family. He seems really comfortable with social media. At times tho, it is really TMI. He is also about 10 yrs younger than Armitage.
When people imprint on you and project who they think you are, you really cant win, esp if you show a side that doesn’t line up with that projection.
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I think it’s probably a truism that the more you reveal about yourself, the greater the surface area for someone to dislike you.
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“The amateur tweets. The pro works.”— Steven Pressfield
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yes, and I think that was a subtext of what he said in segment two of the interview (something he’s said before, “I’d rather just get on with the job.”)
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It’s the second time he says that he is not on social media because he’s afraid of revealing too much or saying inappropriate things. I think it is interesting for the shy/introvert discussion. This is typical to shy people. They may want to talk more, but restrain themselves too much.
Don’t have time to say more (and I restrain myself).
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yeah, although the previous time I had assumed it was about things he wasn’t supposed to say about work he was involved in.
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EvLilly tweeted the other day the hashtag #fist.ing. Considering the actual tweet she was unaware of what she wrote. There had been a few funny/ironic re-tweets but can you imagine what happens to Armitage’s account if he writes something like that? O.O
Like Servetus pointed it out, he wants to put his work in front and not himself. Considering that, Armitage won’t simply know what to say about himself which could be of any interest (in his view).
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yeah, I think the result of the last few months has gone to show that *that* is something many Armitage fans want to know nothing about 🙂
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[…] he says, doesn’t please every fan who sees herself as an opinion maker, including me, and the potential for fan angst acknowledged — and not only because I think it will help or at least not hurt his career — but also […]
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Speaking for himself, or: Why I like Richard Armitage tweeting | Me + Richard Armitage said this on August 25, 2014 at 10:43 am |