The new fame: Internet celebrity - narcissisticabuse

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Sam Vaknin author of Malignant Self-love Narcissism Revisited

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From: "Sam Vaknin author of Malignant Self-love Narcissism Revisited" <vak...@mt.net.mk>

Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2009 12:48:49 +0100

Local: Fri, Nov 6 2009 6:48 am

Subject: The new fame: Internet celebrity

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Cyber-celebrity vs. "Real" World Fame

http://www.globalpolitician.com/26011-celebrity-fame-media-narcissism...

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/05/01/roflcon/index.html

The new fame: Internet celebrity
a.. Story Highlights
b.. ROFLCon is called the biggest gathering of Internet micro-celebrities

c.. What makes one meme succeed when others fail?

d.. Mouse clicks determine what becomes famous, what withers away in obscurity

e.. Next Article in Technology »
By Anne Hammock
CNN
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (CNN) -- The Internet is setting a new standard for celebrity. Fame is no longer about getting "15 minutes"; it's about becoming famous to 15 people.

Leslie Hall shows off one of the sparkly tops that earned her notoriety on the Web.

The Internet allows the masses to wrest control of fame from traditional media, creating micro-celebrities with the click of a mouse, says David Weinberger of the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
Weinberger focused on the Internet celebrity in his keynote address at ROFLCon (pronounced roffle-con), a conference on Internet culture held at MIT.

Some say ROFLCon is the biggest gathering of micro-celebrities ever: "the Internet, in person," as one organizer said.

Among the panelists: "gem sweater" fashionista Leslie Hall, "Tron Guy" Jay Maynard, Fark.com founder Drew Curtis, World of Warcraft character Leeroy Jenkins (born Ben Shultz) and Kyle MacDonald, who gained international attention for an online chronicle of his adventures starting with one red paper clip and trading, one item at a time, up to a home in Saskatchewan, Canada.

If you've never heard of these people, don't worry.

At least a few Internet users have, and that's all that matters. It is what makes Internet celebrity so different from the tabloid-fodder fame of folks like Paris Hilton and Brittney Spears.

Traditional celebrity lives and dies based on raw numbers: how many magazines mention them, how many television shows feature them, how many people talk about them around the water cooler.

Internet fame can be more intimate, Weinberger says, more of a personal connection between the one and the few.

Sometimes the content of a Web site becomes much more famous than the people behind it. Internet-circulated videos, photographs, catchphrases or other concepts are called memes, and creating or harnessing a successful one is like trying to catch lightning in a bottle.

Don't Miss
a.. The Internet, in real life
A key question at ROFLCon is what makes one meme succeed when thousands of others fail.

Geoffrey Golden of Meteor Games says, "If we had the answer, we would be gazillionaires. It's what marketers, what everyone is trying to figure out."

The most successful meme today is LOLcats, pictures of cats captioned with a unique blend of text speak, fractured grammar and Internet in-jokes. The main repository can be found at a site called I Can Has Cheezburger, which gets millions of page views every day.

The site is so popular, it now needs a staff of eight to handle traffic and submissions. LOLcats have spawned dozens of copycats, including a LOLcat Bible, LOLpresidents, LOLbots and LOLtheorists.

The word-of-mouth spread of any given meme is another aspect of how Internet fame differs from traditional celebrity. Even the slickest PR effort can fail miserably if Internet users choose to ignore it. The general consensus of the content providers gathered at ROFLCon is that you have to just build it and see whether they will come.

Adam Lindsey, who created a computer language spinoff of LOLcats called LOLcode, said, "The idea is everything; you are nothing. If it is successful, all you are is sort of a midwife helping it into the world. If you try to control a meme, you just tend to squash it, so enjoy it without ego and let it take itself wherever it wants to go."

Mouse clicks determine what becomes famous and what withers away in obscurity. And the most certain way to get a huge bump in traffic is to be featured on Web news aggregators like Slashdot, Fark, Digg or Reddit, influential blogs such as Boing Boing and MetaFilter, or social bookmarking sites like de.licio.us.

These sites are the new "critics," but their power to create fame lies largely in their communities. Although a traditional critic talks as one to the many, visitors to these sites act, as Weinberger noted, "the many to the many."

Before, fame was about scarcity, with only a few people reaching the status of celebrity. But Weinberger points out that the fame of the Internet is about abundance.

As a community, we help bestow it, and as individuals, any of us can achieve it, given the right circumstances. Weinberger said, "Fame is becoming ours; we are making it ours, as we are doing so much else in our culture. Fame now reflects us."

Cyber-celebrity vs. “Real” World Fame

By Sam Vaknin
Author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"

I know at least ten people whose personal Websites attract as many unique visitors a year as the number of copies sold of Dan Brown’s books. Yet, Dan Brown is a global celebrity and they remain largely anonymous. Why is that? Fame is defined as the number of people who have heard about you. If the same number of people learns of your existence online as has heard of Dan Brown, why is it that he is in all the prime time TV talk shows and you are not? What is the difference between cyber-fame and the “real world” variety? Isn’t the Internet an integral part of our reality?

Not really.

Many veteran institutions regard cyberspace as a threat to their continuing prosperity, or even existence. The publishing, music, and film industries; academe; libraries; bookstores; newspapers; and governments are all apprehensive about the Internet’s culture of laissez faire, seeming encroachment on their territories, and controlled anarchy. They deliberately (and at their own peril) ignore the main actors there. Thus, while “real-world” experts may have a presence on the Internet (in the form of a blog or a social networking page), specialists whose mainstay is in cyberspace are rarely if ever invited to share their wisdom and experience with academics and other gatekeepers. They are shunned because they “lack credentials” or because their virtual presence makes them “not serious”. Online fame and celebrity do not spill over into television and magazine fame or academic recognition because television and magazines and universities and publishers of works of reference are being decimated by the Internet and regard it as “the competition”.

The medium itself – the Internet – poses additional obstacles to attaining “real world” fame. Because barriers to entry are low (anyone can and does have a Website), reputation relies solely on word-of-mouth. As opposed to other mechanisms of establishing reputation and credentials (such as peer review or investigative journalism), the word-of-mouth sort is very easy to manipulate and control. The Internet’s is a mob mentality and crowds source its “information”. In other words: to an extreme degree, you can’t trust what you read and see online. Text, images, videos can all be doctored and tampered with. Nothing is authentic and, therefore, nothing is “real”. Rumours, gossip, and disjointed facts pass for “knowledge” or “reporting”. Since the bulk of cyberspace is populated by anonymous users and because identities, personal biographies, credentials, and claims cannot be staked or supported properly, the Internet is a universe of apparitions, ephemeral avatars, and “handles”. These tend to vanish overnight with startling regularity.

The celebrities of the “real world” – from Madonna to Dan Brown – have been with us for many years. Their output has been vetted by peers, editors, publishers, media executives, producers, anchors, eyewitnesses, and flesh-and-blood consumers. We feel a modicum of intimacy with Brad Pitt that we can never develop with, say, Larry Singer (a co-founder of the Wikipedia). Brad Pitt is three-dimensional: he has a body, a face, a wife, kids, habits we follow, comments he utters, interviews he grants, property he buys and sells, movies he makes, causes he supports. The number of people who use the Wikipedia annually far exceeds the number of people who had watched all of Pitt’s films put together. Yet, few have heard about Sanger. That’s because Sanger is a mere handle: he is two-dimensional, more a representation of a concept than a “person”. We may know he is out there and we may be cognizant of his contributions to the Wikipedia and Citizendium, but that is the extent of it. Jimmy Wales – Wikipedia’s other co-founder and driving force – is as close to a cyber-celebrity as they get, yet even he doesn’t reap an infinitesimal fraction of the coverage that Pitt effortlessly garners.

Until the Internet is better regulated, the way to fame is outside its bounds. Cyberspace is merely another – marginal and auxiliary - marketing and branding venue. No matter how many people have visited your Website as long as they haven’t “met” you through a more reliable venue (newspaper, print book, television, even radio), you are likely to remain anonymous (literally: nameless).

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