Tap into Google:

“who is the most successful musician in history”

… and it will bring up his name. Yet it seems that a large section of the tweetocracy have never even heard of Sir Paul McCartney.

His performance at last night’s Grammy awards, left many baffled and “Who is Paul McCartney?” quickly became a trending topic on Twitter.

That was one of the tamer tweets – you can see some of the others on the right. Click on the image for the large version.

Love him or hate him, it’s incredible to think that an artist responsible for more than 15 million album sales (in the States alone) left many social networkers scratching their heads.

Unsurprisingly it didn’t take long before there was an amused and every-so-slightly outraged backlash across the social media networks bemoaning “the youth of today”.

It’s an interesting glimpse into the way the younger generation interacts with new media and has come to expect and almost rely on almost constant 24 hour promotion from its celebrity superheroes. If you’re not tweeting, blogging and advertising products on national television every 4 and half seconds it doesn’t matter whether you’re Shakespeare, Mozart or a best selling Beatle – in one corner of the Internet you’ll simply cease to exist.