Mad Men’s “Alternate Twitterverse”

I just found out that @benjamin_spock is following me on Twitter. I’m getting the feeling that I’m being sucked in to an Alternate Twitterverse generated by Mad Men.

About two dozen new Twitterers have followed me over the last couple of weeks, and the majority of them have been characters from Mad Men. At first it was just @don_draper, who I first started following based on only a real-world conversational recommendation from a friend. Then @peggyolson befriended me (and for a moment I thought she was a human). Soon I had a dozen Mad Men following me, both from the Sterling Cooper agency and, soon, from their clients and their families.

But that was just the beginning. Soon I had several early-60s Madison Avenue giants following me, too, including @David_Ogilvy and @billbernbach. Clearly the Alternate Twitterverse surrounding don_draper was bigger than I’d imagined.

But now I know what’s happening. The Alternate Twitterverse of 1962 is taking over the real Twittersphere of 2008. With the appearance of Benjamin Spock, it is only a matter of time before Buckminster Fuller appears. And James Baldwin. And Glenn Gould. And Doris Day. And Lenny Bruce, Jacques Tati, Sylvia Plath, Alan Shepard, Jackie Kennedy, Bill Paley, Vladimir Nabokov.

And now I’m name dropping, so I’ll stop.