How Technology made the Greatest Celebrity

The greatest celebrity to hit this generation is neither tall or statuesque, fair nor tanned skinned blond nor brunette. She or He doesn’t have a distinctive physical quality that makes him or her of star quality. The greatest celebrity of this generation can be conventionally beautiful or conventionally plain, the greatest celebrity to hit this generation is you. Yes folks and technology made it possible. With the emergence of social networking sites such as friendster and facebook people have the chance more than ever and share their lives in a grand scale: the rest of the world through the internet. This has been further entrenched in people’s sociological sphere with the rise of blogging. Soon enough people are making personal blogs which serves as a daily account of their lives wherein they feature their photos and other activities in real life. Call it self-love on a grand scale. To the world’s surprise this type of journals had an intense following and canny e-commerce giants such as Google took note and offered bloggers ad sense: a revenue making tool. This further upped the value of blogs as something of an asset and time spent on maintaining one an investment that makes revenue in real cash. Lately we have seen the rise of microblogging services such as friend feed and twitter. Friend feed and Twitter follow the blow by blow account of one’s daily itinerary making one feel that hey I am becoming more and more of a celebrity or so this is how it feels to be like a celebrity. Soon enough some people incorporate these microblogs in their social networking. But as with celebrity hood in movie and film celebrityhood over the internet has the same price: the importance of being beloved. Being an introvert is not an option in this generation anymore. One has to have the maximal value of friends and acquaintances to add in their e-mail and social networking applications. Of course the friendship or the acquaintanceship should be deep enough to prod the other person to leave a meaningful message in one’s social networking site, thus increasing one’s celebrity value over the internet. A precursory look at WebPages like friendster and facebook shows that it is a veritable fan page where people leave their testimonials and graphic art offerings for their friends. People make shrines for themselves over the internet making it as pleasing to the eye as possible and they showcase their life celebrity style. This is a new form of vanity and self love: if you love yourself you have to gain as much following over the internet as possible. This generation values friendship and connection more than ever and advances in technology have made it possible. Digital cameras make sharing visual data faster than ever before. Internet celebrityhood is divided into two those who actually have a life to exhibit and those who merely watch and satisfy their voyeuristic tendency. This is an age where exhibitionists and stalkers thrive to living with each other in the cyber world each feeding off each other hating each but in the end can’t live without each other because they have to validate each other. This kind of set up is not so different from the real world of celebrityhood after all, only that it involves ordinary people like you and me.