世界艾滋病日明星關微博籌善款
艾莉西亞•凱斯、Lady Gaga、亞瑟小子等美國娛樂界名人計劃在世界艾滋病日當天開始暫時關閉自己的Twitter、Facebook等社交網站賬號，以響應由艾莉西亞•凱斯代表的“拯救孩子”慈善機構最新發起的一項活動——“數字化死亡”，直到活動募集到一百萬美元的善款之後，所有參與者的賬戶纔會再次開放。明星們分別在11月30日晚在各自的社交網站發佈最後一條信息，呼籲粉絲積極參與籌款活動，好讓自己儘快“重獲生命”。在此之前，他們還參與錄製了該活動的推廣視頻，視頻中明星們都躺在棺材裏，以表現這次活動的主題——數字化死亡。
ON Wednesday, Kim Kardashian is going to die a little. So is her sister, Khloé, not to mention Lady Gaga, David LaChapelle, Justin Timberlake, Usher, Serena Williams and Elijah Wood.
That day is World AIDS Day, and each of these people (as well as a host of others — the list keeps growing) will sacrifice his or her own digital life. By which these celebrities mean they will stop communicating via Twitter and Facebook. They will not be resuscitated, they say, until their fans donate $1 million.
“Dry your eyes, everybody,” Ryan Seacrest, the “American Idol” host and another participant in this cyberstunt, says in a videotaped “Last Tweet and Testament” that will be posted on his Facebook profile — and appended to a final post on Twitter — sometime after midnight on Tuesday night. “I don’t plan to be dead for too long.”
He adds, “Please buy back my life.”
“Come on, y’all,” the actress Jennifer Hudson says in a similar videotaped plea. “Buy my life back. Go on a shopping spree and buy as much of it as you can.”
It’s all part of the latest gambit by the singer-songwriter Alicia Keys to raise money for her charity, Keep a Child Alive, which finances medical care and support services for children and families affected by H.I.V. and AIDS in Africa and India.
On Sept. 30, Ms. Keys and her charity’s co-founder, Leigh Blake, started Buy Life, which sells $35 gray T-shirts imprinted with a bar code. People who have uploaded a Stickybits or Wimo application to their smartphones can donate $10 to Keep a Child Alive simply by scanning any Buy Life T-shirt’s bar code.
“This Shirt Fights AIDS,” the shirts say on the back. “Scan the bar code or Text ‘BUYLIFE’ to 90999 to Join the Fight.”
The planned “Digital Death” this week will take that idea a step further. Famous people with lots of friends, fans and followers will go silent online, but not before calling for an outbreak of generosity. The participants are believed to have nearly 29 million fans on Twitter alone.
And as of Sunday, three days before World AIDS Day, stylized full-color photographs of celebrities lying in coffins, seemingly lifeless, with eyes closed, are to be displayed on the Buy Life Web site.
“Kim Kardashian is DEAD,” says the text that accompanies one of those photos, which features the reality-show star in a low-cut sequined burial outfit that suggests she “died” after a night out clubbing. “Kim sacrificed her digital life to give real life to millions of others,” it adds, asking fans to “visit or text ‘KIM’ to ‘90999’ to buy her life now.”
The strategy here is not just to shock people into paying attention but to enable them to give by doing, as Ms. Keys puts it, “what you always do.”
“You’re always texting your friends,” she says. “Now, you’re going to text to Buy Life.”
All that fans have to do is text the first name of the celebrity they’re “mourning” to 90999, and $10 will be donated.
“It’s a really instant way of grabbing their compassion,” Ms. Blake says
