Correlation? Or Nah?

One question we might have is how do we know that the spike in Twitter traffic correlates with the new presence of celebrities on Twitter? There could be a substantial lag in time between a celebrity joining the site and their fans finding out about this, however is thought is debunked by the idea of “timeless time.” Gane and Beer (2008) explain that this is “an accelerated time that is unique to the new media age. It is a computerized time created by machines that operate and communicate with each other at speeds far beyond the sensory perceptions of their users” (p. 21). Basically, once a celebrity joins Twitter and tweets, that information is made available to the public in an instant through the use of real time tweets constantly being posted on the site. Assuming that the celebrity’s Twitter is made public to everyone, anyone has the ability to find out which celebrities are joining Twitter and they can in return join Twitter in an instant.