Actor Ashton Kutcher has always expressed his love of Iowa and its people...while wife Mila Kunis has effusively praised breakfast pizza in the national media. Kutcher was born in Cedar Rapids and spent his high school years in the town of Homestead. He often returns to Iowa and loves to re-connect.
But I didn't know he found fame so isolating (he and wife Mila live in Carpinteria, California), that he'd ask me to text him...kind of.
Kutcher turned heads this week when he supposedly put his personal phone number on social media (it contained the Cedar Rapids area code) and tweeted "I miss having a real connection w/ real people."
Reporters checked and the phone number goes to a start up messaging service called Community. When a fan texts they get a computer-generated message that tells them all future messages will be from Ashton himself.
Kutcher's tweet said he wanted to have real connections with real people and doing it in text will allow him to share unedited views. Community's privacy policy says it allow subscribers to send messages to fans and followers and fans to do the same, but no messages are “private,” but fair game for advertising use.
During my time as a legislator, I put my cell phone number online. Some constituents were surprised that I actually answered...no, I didn't have "people." And you didn't need to hear an ad.