The rest is silence

Raising money for charity by not Tweeting or updating Facebook statuses is, surely, little more than sponsored silence 2.0?

It's nice that famous people are pitching in and helping out with Alicia Keys' charity by taking the pledge to not Tweet until a target is met, but there's more than a slight tang of the self-regard about the project:

Grammy-winning singer Keys, 29, said it was "really important and super-cool to use mediums that we naturally are on".

Naturally.

"This is such a direct and instantly emotional way and a little sarcastic, you know, of a way to get people to pay attention," said Keys, who has more than 2.6 million followers on Twitter.

A little sarcastic? Really?

I think the idea is that a Twitter without Lady GaGa is so unimaginable that we'll start selling our hair and kidneys just to persuade her to come back.

Or maybe it isn't. There is some sort of point being made, fuzzily:

Leigh Blake, the president and co-founder of Keep a Child Alive, said: "We're trying to sort of make the remark: 'Why do we care so much about the death of one celebrity as opposed to millions and millions of people dying in the place that we're all from?'"

Although given this story is headline "GaGa among stars quitting Facebook for charity", I don't really think that remark is sort of being made in any way effectively. This is a story about Twitter and celebrities, not about the HIV-hit families in Africa. If that was the real aim, wouldn't getting some of them to Tweet through GaGa's account be much, much more effective?