Whispering Ambient Intimacies

I Want To Be Famous!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
According to Wikipedia-A celebrity is a widely-recognized or notable person who commands a high degree of public and media attention. The word stems from the Latin verb "celebrare" but one may not become a celebrity unless public and mass media interest is piqued.

With the rise of the internet a new breed of celebrity has arisen. Hammock of CNN writes,
"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." With previous communication technologies, books, TV, newspapers, film, an editor - owner - creator - saw an opportunity in somebody - this little glimmer was quickly mass produced and sold to the masses. Fans faithfully ate their daily dinner of a dream life that they could not touch. The CNN article focuses on David Weinberger;

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.

what we see now is a world full of users creating their own culture----instead of a bunch of lonely isolated people who have no place in the medium that defines their culture outside the clicker and the pocket book -(and the reality TV vagrants)-----

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."

Microfame - Internet Celebrity - Micro-Celeb- Z-lebrity- Whatever you want to call it is a reflection of the difference between TV & Internet in terms of the medium. As McLuhan said the medium is the message - McKenna comments on this captured by YouTube - that people who dispute over the content of TV are missing the point - the TV as a medium effects us differently than a book, differently than the radio, etc. -
The internet is exciting in that it allows viewer to create themselves and their communities (click, create, blog, twitter, browse, igoogle, youtube, flickr) instead of sitting in the living room and having their identity and community sold to them through the boobtube.
Want to be famous? Rex Sorgatz outlines the hard road to being a micro-celeb in his NY Magazine article. Self-publish like Adam Bahner's (aka Tay Zonday) -"Chocolate Rain" YouTube hit that made the 25 year old polisci student a multi-millionaire.

"microfame is its own distinct species of celebrity, one in which both the subject and the "fans" participate directly in the celebrity's creation. Microfame extends beyond a creator's body of work to include a community that leaves comments, publishes reaction videos, sends e-mails, and builds Internet reputations with links."


**Tweet***Tweet**Heard of Twitter - The --hottest thing-- since sliced bread. Twitter is a service where members make small announcements that are updated instantly to all of their followers-

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Twitter is not only satisfying INSTINCTIVE impulses (i.e. the selfishness of being famous, the greed of wanting instant results, the need to speak and be heard, the freedom and equality in being able to take part in a conversation no matter your economic or social status) but Twitter is making each and every person who uses the medium to feel IMPORTANT.



So as I am reading about MicroFame I decided to make a tumblr account - Seems like a sweet website, like the email in from your phone, and even call in to leave an audio message. Unfortunatly I can only follow one friend from my google contacts - I guess its not as hot as Twitter - even though I only had like 8 friends on Twitter. But my FB account is off the hook and I have over 800 'friends'.
Thus the problem with some of these other sites that lack the user network already developed on larger sites like Facebook. To the average non-famous twitter seems like another unessary addition to their web surfing- but its advantage is its asynchronous nature. This is great for celebs who have followers but dont want to follow their fans updates.
FB and Twitter are at war right now (kind of).

FB is introducing new interface changes to allow for more twitter like micro-blogs istead of the original status update - FB attempted to buy out Twitter for $500 million...Evan Williams, Twitter's founder is no twitwad and most likely he has some tweetable ideas up his sleeve -
Next advantage - instant communication - word of mouth/text/ideas/too much info @ speed of super Now. Social movements are using social networking sites to spread their message
technologies to communicate for instant gatherings and to spread info such as the New Zealand Internet Blackout.

Twitter is a pencil. Facebook, on the other hand, is Photoshop.
Battelle's pencil/photoshop metaphor is close to cute - but misses the point - Yes Facebook is prepackaged space in which users can share easily but Twitter is something else. Clive Thompson's sees its true value, @ a tool for reporting your real-time location to friends — is cumulative."

The power of Micro Fame has created a psychological feeling of presence on Twitter.

Clive Thompson's article in the New York Times describes this feeling as ambient intimacy. It is like ESP - Ambient Awareness is "very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye" - excessive amounts of information - ideas - words - tweets - micro-celeb wannabes - the speed of now is at the fingertips - I see it all coming quickly - searching faster - live time - and I feel close with those who are also sharing my idea - my tweet - my click right NoW- Users, (perhaps cluckers is a better term - because people are clicking not just using)

The term is catchy - and it brings the human back to the discussion which often lacks human terms - Network - Hyper-Connectivity - Post-Human Subjectivity
Leisa Reichelt prefers ambient intimacy because it combines, "the human ‘ickyness’ of ‘intimacy’ with the distributed and non-directional nature of ‘ambiance’."
Reichelt thinks Tweeter like communication is good for phatic expression, language for sharing social information not necessarily ideas or information. For Reichelt ambient intimacy is the village green of the global village - But she is missing something uncanny at work - Ambient intimacy is better thought of in terms of a pattern of movement than a spatial metaphor. As McLuhan later moved from global village to global theatre - Ambient Intimacy is the movement of the actor who channels the performance - who performs catharsis for their society - It is the drama on stage - and we are all acting in this play. But the intimacy is a relation - it is the feeling between actor and audience - that brings tears to both eyes - more accuratly it may be the actors process of giving up self - to channel the social - to give birth - to the character - that relates - but it is all caught up in the movements.
Kathersis/Catharsis was the aim of Greek tragedy - Brecht critiqued this in the early 19th century - arguing that such a view of drama that did not aim to make the audience get on stage - to think - but only to reaffirm themselves as who they already were (audience) members - only a theatre that moved beyond Aristotilian catharis where the audience gains something from the play. Brecht also disliked the temporal fixation - as if the actor's emotion was in one moment - one time - that stage - one person - Brecht streches Catharsis to only being complete when the audience integrates the emotions into themselves - a goal to be achieved by the use of what Brecht calls the Verfremdungseffekt: the Alienation or Estrangement effect.
Instead of drama Brecht calls for Epic Theatre - He attempts to make the audience see things in a new way through the V effect - where by the audience is not simply blindly emphathisizing with the actor but rather holds a certain distance - but still familiar (Kiralyfalvi 90).


Brecht's method of alienation was confrontational - the actor would refer to themself in the 2nd or 3rd person - saying he did this - she went there -

Similar to status updates or twitter updates :

What are you doing?

Cyborg Deva is Blogging.
The computer is a strange stage for performing the self -

Hmmm--A blogger describes her performances of her breakup online -

" learned this lesson the hard way. I blogged about my breakup that started in February 2007....Blogging was cathartic for me... If I had to blog, he wanted to know, why did I have to blog there and not where my friends were?...Then came Twitter, which, thanks to its ambient intimacy, made staying involved in my friend’s lives a lot easier. Even though we were, in some cases, separated by 2,100+ miles and three time zones, we still had this wonderful sense of connection...what’s expressed publicly and tagged with my name? That’s big. And brave. And Google-able. And cache-able. It’s a huge leap of faith in our friends, our acquaintances, and most of all, in whatever this is between us"

Brenda Laurel writes an interesting article by which she sees human-computer interaction as a theatre - the computer is a performance - what users (audiences care about) is according to her not the tools, graphics, but the feeling of being there - Being in the moment -

Back to the Blogger --------Blogging was a release of emotion - Aristotilian notion of catharasis perhaps - Twitter was not a space to release - not a stage - but a means of communication. A whisper that escapes the lips and takes on a pattern of its own - It is now - instead of there, before, his, hers, etc.