Edited by author 03-20-2002 06:54 PM
Don't mind my ramblings, but why should fame be an issue for netizens? Part of the internet's benefit is that a viewer can also be a participant, and early on most things like IRC, MUD, Usenet, email, etc were popular because everyone was on the same level. With the coming of the WWW, things started to move towards viewer/viewee. Dividing up people into the 'famous'/'not famous' classes may diminish the value of the internet.
On a different topic: like jkottke said below, there doesn't seem to be a meta-mass-media like Entertainment Tonight singling out the internet-stars and packaging little stories about them. The internet IS the meta-mass-media, with fan-sites, weblogs, IRC, email newsletters, etc. How many writers for People Magazine, Seventeen, Entertainment Tonight, etc, do you know? Readers are attracted to People magazine & Entertainment Tonight for the content, not because the content creators are famous. kottke.org becomes famous because it's a repository for links & info, not because Jason Kottke has ever done anything fame-worthy (what HAS Jason Kottke done besides his website, anyways? :) j/k). Kottke as 5,000 sites
linking to his (according to Google) because his site is a place to find out information about content set up for entertainment. Even his oft-mentioned
9/11 entry was mostly a collection of links to other sites.
For fame to occur online, there probably has to be someone who regularly creates their own original content, recieving mass discussion on the 'blogs & other central sites. It seems the people who have been getting attention (like Stile or AICN or Drudge, and most of the others listed here) are just commenting on other things, rather than creating things themselves. Maybe the reason that musicians & writers online (or even oddities like Emotion Eric or Robot Frank) don't have more fame is that there aren't enough kottke's writing about them.
The attraction to weird news articles seems to me the bulk of most blog's contents, and things move so fast online that once a few sites write about Emotion Eric, it's left in the dust and quickly becomes old news. Actors & Musicians are always putting out new albums, performing new roles, etc. There isn't much of that online.
Sidethought: Famous people in traditional media have media engines behind them, and they have a large support system which keeps them moving, creating new things, writing new scripts, performing new songs, etc. The people we think of as famous online just create things themselves, and publish on their own. If you're an actor and you start getting famous, you have an agent who'll keep you creating new things, hooking you up with other directors & writers who want you to continue be famous so that they succeed in their jobs. Famous people are the pinnacle of a bunch of other people's work. There's not that kind of structure online - everyone is on their own, creating their one or two interesting things, and if they get noticed, they get noticed. If you're
OddTodd, what do you do next? I don't mean give ongoing interviews talking about oddtodd.com; I mean, what's the next thing he creates to keep the fame moving? If you've written a dozen songs and put them online, and one got a bunch of downloads, how do you funnel that interest into downloading the next songs you write? To address a previous reference; Jack Nicholson isn't famous today because of his role in the Shining -- while a great role, Jack has progressed, with new roles & new projects and new art being created over the decades. If anything, wilwheaton.net isn't famous because of Wil Wheaton - it's just another step in his much-larger fame, the fame of Wil Wheaton. If all he did was wilwheaton.net, despite his history as an actor, there'd be stagnation and he'd cease being famous.
Phew; blah, blah, blah, blah....after re-reading my ramblings, I considered deleting it all, but I think the original post was asking for brainstorming ideas, so I'll leave it as is.
(grrr...and I promised myself I would change my name this time yet forgot, but again I'm not Powazek. I should make a t-shirt that says that. That'd rock. Meta-reference to a media icon in the meta-mass-media environment.)
