March 11, 2008
Go ask a baby boomer — or some gen Xers, for that matter —how folks got famous back in their day, and they’ll likely go on a ramble about how you had to have talent, or at least exposure, and at the very least you had to be kind of good-looking, or notorious in some way, and it might help to have known Andy Warhol, or ...
And here they may go looking for their glasses.
While this rant might sound surprisingly familiar (exposure, semi-good looks, notoriety ... somehow this all smacks of a certain blond hotel heiress), thus narrowing the generation gap, our generation will always have that yawning chasm between us and anyone born before the mid-'80s: the Internet.
Yes, your parents do use the Internet. Your grandparents probably use the Internet. But older generations employ the Web more as a sometimes-indecipherable tool and sometimes a mild form of entertainment: They check the weather, they e-mail friends, they Google insurance rates, they play some Tetris.
Our generation, however, is fluent in the Internet and has the monopoly on fun, exciting and civilization-destroying ways to use and abuse the Web. Witness Facebook and MySpace. Witness YouTube. Witness Wikipedia. Witness viral video, Photobucket, chatrooms. Please try your hardest not to witness the stomach-churning "Three Horrors of the Internet."
But our biggest claim to Internet-usage fame is ,well, fame.
Andy Warhol, that clever, creepy son of a gun noted for his ability to churn out minor celebrities like Edie Sedgwick, once predicted that in the future, everyone would be famous for 15 minutes.
Andy, man, it’s called YouTube.
We now live in an age where anyone with access to the Internet — that is, virtually everyone — can become well-known just by setting up a Webcam and yapping.
Granted, it’s not a completely egalitarian setup, as the most popular "vlogs" (short for video blog, and possibly the ugliest word in existence) are run by either cute blonds or complete nutcases.
Case in point: Chris Crocker, who is arguably both.
You might remember Mr. Crocker, who was famous for about a five days. He’s the Tennessee teenager who filmed himself under a bedsheet, sobbing and screaming about the plight of Britney Spears, makeup streaming and platinum hair flying.
The diatribe quickly became the most-watched video on YouTube, subjecting Crocker to a media maelstrom of mockery — but also landing him a reality-show contract.
Besides being a schadenfreude-palooza, the Crocker incident was also a watershed in determining the new laws of attaining fame. One no longer need be a singing sensation or real-estate entrepreneur in order to attain celebrity; all one needs now is a video camera, a few hot-button talking points and a diminished concept of dignity.
But not all celebrities end up writhing in pools of self-degradation. Model and party girl Cory Kennedy was only 16 when she was "discovered" through her MySpace and now seems to be living a cushy, satisfying hipster lifestyle, with minimal setbacks. While she’s only a "minor" celebrity, she has garnered a burgeoning cult following, and with the help of the Internet, the public can watch an It Girl in the making rise to fame before its very eyes.
With the pervasiveness of the Internet in out daily lives, it was inevitable that it would usher in a new generation of stars and freaks for us to take a gander at.
That said, it’s also inevitable that it will even further cheapen our ideas about fame, talent and recognition. Now, we can only bite our nails and hope that Andy Warhol wasn’t right about everything else.
