Imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery, it seems.
That, at least, was the message two weeks ago after a naked Kim Kardashian, slick with oil, posed for the cover of Paper magazine and a number of celebrities poked fun of her ample backside on Instagram.
The singer Joe Jonas photoshopped the face of his brother, Nick, on Ms. Kardashian's naked body, writing, 'What a tease.' And Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi used Photoshop to create a faux Christmas card, scoring points for creative use of red bows. (More than 255,000 people liked the photo.) Other celebrities who posted about the reality star include Miley Cyrus, Jaime King and Madonna. Chelsea Handler, who has made sport of the reality star before, juxtaposed a photograph of her own less voluptuous derrière with that of Ms. Kardashian's, writing:, 'Guess which one's real. Your move, instagram.'
Did those spoofs spark an online uproar? Hardly. Instagram has become the place where celebrities can mock other celebrities without the meanspiritedness usually associated with Twitter. Instagram photos cannot be reposted, which doesn't lend itself to flame wars like those on Twitter. (There, popularity is predicated on retweets and viral comments that can blow up in a celebrity's face overnight.) If Twitter, at times, resembles a brawl in the parking lot, Instagram seems more like gossip at the local bar.
'If you want to follow a conversation on Twitter, that's easy,' said Josh Bernoff, the senior vice president for idea development at Forrester Research and author of 'The Mobile Mind Shift,' a book about smartphone behavior. Users of Instagram usually see only the last three comments. 'That's why celebrities can post without everything going viral,' he said. 'The difference is the audience and what they see.'
One benefit for celebrities who post about one another on Instagram is that photographs, unlike tweets, are less open to interpretation because they are visual. 'They can't be taken out of context,' said Casey Newton, a Silicon Valley writer for The Verge who, among other things, chronicles online culture. Ms. Cyrus mocks a lot of celebrities on Instagram. She photoshopped her head onto the body of Nicki Minaj in a thong - her take on the cover art for Ms. Minaj's 'Anaconda.' (Ms. Minaj didn't like it much.) Ms. Cyrus poked fun at Lil' Kim, too. (She didn't seem to mind.)
But a well-placed dis from one celebrity to another is also as much about promoting one's career as it is about making fun of someone else. Jaime King, a star of the television series 'Hart of Dixie,' posted a photo of herself strutting across a parking lot dressed in a bra, stockings, high heels and minimal underwear. It was tagged #noneedtobreaktheinternet, a play on the idea that the release of Ms. Kardashian's naked photos would crash the Web. It attracted the attention Ms. King wanted, being republished by news media outlets online.
'If they are making fun of Kim, they are also mocking themselves,' said Bonnie Fuller, the editor in chief of HollywoodLife.com. She added: 'When you take pictures as outrageous as those, I don't think Kim thought she wouldn't be commented on. She has said she wouldn't exist without social media.'
Ms. Kardashian, for her part, recently told an interviewer on the Australian television show 'The Project' that she loved the photographs. 'I did it for me,' she said. Mr. Newton of The Verge agreed. 'I don't think she is reading what people are saying on Instagram,' he said. 'She is a case study, in part, because she is playing by a different set up rules.' Attention getters have always been the butt of other people's jokes.
'And the party girls end up laughing all the way to the bank,' he said.
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