Twitter + Larry King = Internet Heaven

Larry King, left, takes on Ashton Kutcher in a battle of Twitter wits. (Image via Flickr)

You can keep your Buddy Holly; for me, the music died in 2001 when USATODAY shortsightedly canceled Larry King’s weekly column. “King’s Things” was a distillation of the Larry King mindset — a shot in the veins of the man’s addictive brainpower when you couldn’t get to a TV to get your fix.

But God gave us the Internet, the Internet gave us Twitter… and Twitter has given us back our Larry King.

why do some baseball players leave the brims of their hats flat? (10:20 p.m., May 14)

The beauty of Larry King is the completely inverted intellectual process that powers his CNN talk show and his Twitter posts.

On TV, “Larry King Live” is the newsmaker show where news goes unexamined; on the Internet, Twitter is the social network where Larry King’s every trivial thought is over-examined. On TV, “Larry King Live” is a safe haven for the scandalous and the seller — a media perch from which to assert your story, unchallenged. On the Internet, Twitter is the place for Larry King to assault the Twitter nation with an exclamation point-fueled barrage of haphazard posts aimed at an audience whose attention span is challenged when it comes time for 12 rounds of Edie Gormé reminiscing about the joys of playing the great boulevards of Newark and a detailed analysis of the infamous diner where Charles Van Doren used to go for his morning coffee.

What’s the difference between: a frankfurter and a hot dog? Root beer and sarsaparilla? Carmel [sic] and butterscotch? (4:25 p.m., May 13)

I haven’t been a regular viewer of Larry King’s show since he stepped down as unofficial press secretary for Ross Perot in the ’90s, but with Twitter, I can again engage with the man who once carried CNN on his gaunt, hunched shoulders. And while some TV news personalities use Twitter simply as an outlet to tout their video clips and plug upcoming shows, King is proving himself a deft practitioner of social conversation and Web 2.0 media. Amid the flurry of posts about his children’s baseball games and Hollywood name-dropping (I hope he liked “Angels and Demons”!), King crowd-sources topics for his show, probes his followers for leads and reaches out to coax reluctant sources into the light:

we’re talking about murder tonight, have you ever known anyone who was murdered? (9:27 p.m., May 8)

And while this new, hard-news Larry King is sometimes a jarring experience, King softens it by using his Twitter feed to remind you that, on his show, some things remain constant. On “Larry King Live,” everyone is still a friend, everyone is presumed innocent, everyone is assumed capable of humility and atonement and has a worth in this world directly proportional to how much they entertain King and/or are able to get him good seats to the game.

I am heart sick over the Manny incident. I really like him personally & professionally. He’s one of the greatest ballplayers ever. (5:54 p.m., May 7)

And yet, for all his new-found social Web prowess, King’s grasp of new personal communications technology does experience the occasional growing pain. On Twitter, King still exhibits the same blind spot he often displays on his TV show: that sometimes the obvious should go without saying:

I’ve never learned anything listening to myself talk. (1:23 p.m., April 28)