Neighbours finally gets networked

The recent article contained within the Media section of The Age last Monday couldn't help but make me laugh with the title "Neighbours takes roles to Twitter". The brief reflection on Fremantle Media's latest attempt to entice Gen-Y into their program is apparently being claimed as "the first in the world" "to establish Twitter accounts for its fictional characters".

According to The Age, the Twitter accounts were created to "bring the characters off screen and allow the audience to interact with them". Basically, the character's onscreen narratives are detailed in 140 word blog posts just like the 7,038,000 users who log on each day to talk about what they had for breakfast.

Now personally, I have never been able to understand the point of Twitter. In 140 words, you are supposed to be able to detail any emotions, thoughts and ideas you have had recently. I don't know about you but if I attempted to write down all of my emotions, thoughts and ideas, it would take up a lot more than 140 words. As a result, I have never been much intersted in the sight and only set up an account to check out what Lily Allen was up to lately.

This is why I can not see this scheme by FM working out at all. What seems like a good idea to some seems to me like a whole load of work which probably isn't going to pay off. For a start, you have to think about every single thing that is happening in the lives of the Neighbours characters rather than just what's happening on screen. This means employing a whole team of writers just to write our 140 words detailing what Zeke does in the bathroom or what poem Ringo's just created for Donna, something I wouldn't be entirely interested to watch on screen and would be less interested to read on the web.

And I think I speak for the rest of my generation when I say this. Rarely do we give up the precious minutes of our self-indulgent lives to waste our short-attention span on Neighbours at 6 o'clock each day which is why I can't see when we would find the time to log onto Twitter to read up on what our characters are doing outside of their usual timeslot.

Frankly, I think Neighbours should stick to one medium and one medium only and perhaps when it has been able to conquer that, then it can think about moving on to bigger and better things.