A weird thing happened yesterday. First I got a call from a Swedish journalist writing about a Danish kid who has become famous on the Net for nothing in particular and is now weighing his options as a possible recording star. Since I’ve written about Web fame (in Small Pieces Loosely Joined, in 2002) and talked about it (at the keynote of the first ROFLcon conference in 2008), he gave me a talk and we had a fun conversation.

That conversation prompted me to write a post about how Web fame has changed over the past few years. I was mostly through a first draft when I got a call from a journalist at a well-known US newspaper who is doing a story about Web fame, and wanted to talk with me about it. Huh?

Keep in mind that I hadn’t yet posted about the topic. He got to me totally independently of the Swedish journalist. And it’s not like I spend my mornings talking to the press. It’s just a completely weird coincidence.

Anyway, afterwards I posted what I had written. It’s at Medium. Here’s the beginning:

It’s a great time to be famous, at least if you’re interested in innovating new types of fame. If you’re instead looking for old-fashioned fame, you’re out of luck. We’re in a third epoch of fame, and this one is messier than any of the others. (Sure, that’s an oversimplification, but what isn’t?)

Before the Web there was Mass Fame, the fame bestowed upon lucky (?) individuals by the mass media. The famous were not like you and me. They were glamorous, had an aura, were smiled upon by the gods.

Fame back then was something that was done to the audience. We could accept or reject those thrust upon us by the the mass media, but since fame was defined as mass awareness of someone, the mass media were ultimately in control.

With the dawn of the Web there was Internet Fame. We made people famous…[more]

(Amanda Palmer, whom I use as a positive example of the new possibilities, facebooked the post, which makes me one degree from famous!)

Categories: future dw