Britney Spears

The Max Martin- and Dr. Luke-produced song itself is quintessential Britney — all glitter and earworms and aggressive come-ons — and that’s obviously the point. After spending the better part of the last several years melting down, Spears likely doesn’t want to spring any surprises on her loyal fans. In the past decade, she’s been married twice, had two children, and done time in rehab and the psych ward. The woman has been to some dark places, and her very public failures and flubs are no doubt a huge part of her present success. Maybe another artist would choose to release some quasi-soul searching, been-through-the-fire and I’m-a-survivor empowerment anthem for her return, but Spears didn’t get famous for her pop gravitas. She knows what her audience wants: They want dancing with a snake at the VMAs Britney, not dead behind the eyes, missing her cues at the VMAs Britney. They want her blond, they want her horny, and they definitely want her head unshaved. Come to think of it, even people who aren’t her fans would likely prefer her that way. And by God, that is what she will give them.

But things have changed around the old place since you went away, Britney. There’s always room on the charts for a singer who can offer a few dance hooks in a girl-gone-wild package, but really, Ke$ha’s picked up that baton pretty nicely. In the meantime, Lady Gaga has almost single-handedly reinvented the blonde dance beast aesthetic, proving that a catchy tune, a degree of musical virtuosity, and a bold artistic vision are not all mutually exclusive. As a colleague mused recently, Britney after Gaga is like going back to the greatest bar in your midsize hometown after a year in Manhattan. It’s still comfortable; it just doesn’t seem as eye-popping.

Everybody loves a comeback, and while Britney has had a long and often humiliating road to come back from, she’s made a concerted and often shrewd effort not to detour from it over the past year. She’s managed to dominate Twitter,  amassing millions of followers with her innocuous observations. (She — or her Twitter handler — may not be as entertaining as Kanye, but she’s not as unhinged as Courtney Love either.) She cheekily whet the public appetite for her charms via last fall’s Britney-themed episode of “Glee,” a greatest hits package of her most memorable video moments repurposed for a new generation.

Yet as she seductively claws her way up the Billboard chart this week, leaving her stiletto footprints on Katy Perry and Pink, it’s hard not to question how classic Britney will ultimately hold up in the crowded field of pop tarts. There are worse fates that could befall a woman who’s seen such hard times than to stage a sales-shattering triumph. And she could keep pumping out coolly efficient disco beats from now until the apocalypse. When her new album releases next week, however, wouldn’t it be encouraging if it displayed even a whiff of Kanye-level introspection, of Gaga-caliber risk? She’s still the hot blonde. But as she veers toward 30, she can’t keep partying like it’s 2001 forever. And her career longevity depends on being the woman who doesn’t just ask the world to “Gimme More,” but shows her fans she’s learned she can bestow something more.

Yet just as he’s rearing up on 5 million followers, whose dust should Mr. Demi Moore find himself eating but none other than Britney Spears. As Mashable reports, Spears has in recent days squeaked past Kutcher for supreme Twitter domination.  

Spears is a bigger celebrity, it’s true. And if you were laying odds on a person likelier to have the sort of late-night, incoherent tweet meltdown that makes for lively reading, you’d think the smart money would surely be on Spears. But you’d be mistaken. Because the real victory here isn’t for either person; it’s for one of their personae. Spears’ account, you see, is managed by “her team,” and consists almost exclusively of bland publicity updates. She’s barely posted at all since January, and several of the few updates she does have are from her manager Adam. You won’t get any Kevin Smith-like rants about getting kicked off a plane from this lady, no surreal Mindy Kaling-esque ruminations, no Lindsay Lohan-ish family spats. Just bland corporate data, in easily digestible nuggets. And 4,946,411 followers.

But as any recently bailed-out, multinational corporation could tell you, numbers don’t always tell the whole story. Who are these zillions of people following Britney’s committee-generated tweets anyway? Plenty of seemingly real people who may exist in the offline world, to be sure — and a big fat pool of “premium t-shirt special!” and “listen to free music!” accounts. And the unnerving thing about all these dubious Twitterers — whether they’re the ones promising a “FREE LAPTOP” or asking, “Are you voting for Brit in FHM’s 2010 Sexiest Women In The World?” — is how easily they appear to be thriving without our meaningless human intervention.

No one can take away from us the very real, funny and sometimes very moving moments of connection that social media afford on a daily basis. Nor did anyone ever promise us when we got online that the Internet was created for the sole purpose of fostering dialogue and friendship. But we’re at a point now where the signal is under heavy threat by the noise of promotion just talking to other promotion, where you can say essentially nothing and get 5 million followers, many of whom are also essentially saying nothing.

All of which prompts the question: Does Britney’s much-reported-upon Twitter win prove anything about anything? Does it translate into album sales or sold-out tours or telling anybody anything interesting or new whatsoever? Because I forgot: What are we supposed to be optimizing here again, anyway? Or is it enough to declare that whoever dies with the most followers wins … something? Just have your bot follow my bot, ‘mkay?

Spears may be merrily wearing her new crown today, but her conquest Ashton Kutcher doesn’t seem to mind his demotion to second-rate status. As he posted Sunday — on Twitter of course — “I don’t care.” It may not be much of a statement, but maybe all that really matters is the simple idea that somewhere, a guy with a phone and an opinion really did say it.