Everyone's a little famous sometimes.....*
It is a slow news day today. I hate days like this. Really really can't stand them.
It's like I've entered a serious story-slump after the sheer insanity of last week. But being as there's another blizzard about to wind its way to the Kivalliq... maybe it's not a bad thing that I'm not busting with a great story, because chances are I'll be off at least one day, or part of a day, this week.
In the meantime, I've been catching up on those long-neglected magazines (sometimes this actually helps me come up with story ideas, believe it or not) and I came across an interesting little article about micro-celebrity, that I thought might be of interest to some of my fellow bloggers... especially in light of the Nunies :)
Clive Thompson on the Age of Microcelebrity: Why everyone's a little Brad Pitt
Whenever Peter Hirshberg is at a party, someone eventually pulls out a camera and takes a snapshot with him in it. Hirshberg — chair of the executive committee at the blog-search company Technorati — performs a quick mental calculation: Does the photographer look like one of those people who will immediately dash home and post all their candids to Flickr? "If I think it's going to end up on the Web, I straighten up more, try to smile the right way," Hirshberg says. "Because if it goes online, people I know will probably see it."
Hirshberg has a blog, which means a couple hundred people — some strangers, some friends — regularly follow his comings and goings, his Facebook updates, his online photo trail. Any time he does something embarrassing or stupid, those people will know. So in essence, Hirshberg has to behave like a very minor version of Brad Pitt. He's got to watch out for the paparazzi, be careful with his public image.
But he's not a celebrity. He's a microcelebrity.
Microcelebrity is the phenomenon of being extremely well known not to millions but to a small group — a thousand people, or maybe only a few dozen. As DIY media reach ever deeper into our lives, it's happening to more and more of us. Got a Facebook account? A whackload of pictures on Flickr? Odds are there are complete strangers who know about you — and maybe even talk about you.
0 comments:
Post a Comment