Celebrity 2.0

This is the second version - if you have any suggestions or comments please let me know!

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.

What if Anon is A Woman - Lit Review -

I woke up way too early this morning with a brilliant idea. Last night I felt discouraged with what I thought was a smart move in my project from Anon as a Woman, to micro-celebrity and ambient intimacy. I intially like the move, because I felt it was a move away from a subject that I perhaps selfishly was interested in - as a woman - to something that could connect with more people and be read more postively - When I woke up I realized - they mix....So here is a new literature review. This works a lot better because I can draw from the research I am doing for my thesis and new works that are intriguing me - clearly I have more research than required but since I am also doing my thesis on identity construction within SL I have more to work with - I hope it is not too much.

I want to ask the question what if Anon is a woman? The editors of Race in Cyberspace point to the need to ask such a question; "You may be able to go online and not have anyone know your race or gender-you may even be able to take cyberspace's potential for anonymity a step further and masquerade as a race or gender that doesn't reflect the real, offline you-but neither the invisibility nor the mutability of online identity make it possible for you to escape your 'real world' identity completely." (Kolko Nakamaur Rodman 2000, p.4). Early scholarship online held a utopic vision of cyberspace as gender and race free (Rheingold 1993, Turkle 1995). Yet these utopic dreamers have been proven wrong post the critical turn in cyberstudies (Silver 2000).
Feminist media outlets have criticized the group Anonymous for their cyberbullying characterizing the gorup as white male patriachrs (Bitch 2008). But what is lacking in these analysis, is a more complex view of Anonymity as a constructed identity. Choosing to affiliate with anonymous can be seen as a feminist strategy that has a deep historical basis. Other feminist groups have taken similar strategies such as SubRosa and Guerilla Girls (Rizada 2007). Gender is the most common focus of online identity (Cherny & Wise 1996; Herring 1994; Harcourt 1999; Hawthorne 1999; Green & Dam 2001; Flanagan & Booth 2002; Kendall 2002). When asking if Anon is a woman, I am also asking if Anon is an American Indian, a Palestinian Refugee, a Black Child, a Chinese lesbian - I am asking - if Anon is a marked identity.

As Silver points out, “little published work on the topic of race and cyberspace and even less on sexuality and the Internet. Furthermore, when such work does appear, it usually focuses solely on issues of access. Seldom does scholarship tackle more social and cultural dimensions” (2000 p.135.) There is a need to move beyond material access and expand work on liberating tacitcs and pedagogies online (Banks 2006). Race is an understudied area of cyberstudies, as well is anything that moves beyond the material access debate or visual representation of race online. Nakamura (2000) criticizes high-tech companies ads, and the notions of a global race free village. Lockard examines online nationalism, which as a part of techno-universalism, “camofouflages gross social inequalities and the global economic effects of racialism by announcing the advent of a new historical era” (2000, p.180).

Haraway made famous the post-human subject ‘Cyborg’. Cyborg identity provides fertile grounds for politicizing cyberspace (Haraway 1998; see also Kolko, Nakamuram Rodman 2000 p. 7). Anonymous is a cyborg figure that emerges within the context of a celebrity obsessed culture. Celebritty is a spectator sport, that privilegas a male gaze, which consumes the passive female body online (Mulvey 1975). In this light Anonymous emerges as an ethical collective. Anonymous may be the voice of the end result of ambient intimacy. Ambient intimacy refers to the new loose but increasingly collectivly aware social networks being formed online through newfeeds, and twitter like updates (Thompson 2008). Ambient Intimacy has been studied in relation to teenage use and has been found to paradoxically increase real world social ties (Boyd 2008). In a similarly paradoxical move, Anonymous group members come to know each other, through street protests and private message boards. I want to examine ambient awareness as a form of consciousness raising, that may be seeking to raise self awareness and responsibility in the larger internet community. Anonymity in this light is both an aspect of its members larger constructed online persona, and a social collective that engages in strategic constructions of non-identity, necessary for agency within the hyper-visible world of micro-celebrity.

Banks, A. J. (2006). Race, Rhetoric, and Technology. Urbana: NCTE.

Boyd, D. “Friendship” (2008) Digital Youth Research. http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/book-friendship

Cherney, Lynn and Wise, Elizabeth eds. Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace. Seattle: Seal Press, 1996.

Elmer, G. (2006) The Vertical (Layered) Net. Critical Cyberculture Studies. Silver, D. Massanari, A. eds. New York; New York Press.

Harcourt, Wendy. Women@Internet: creating new cultures in cyberspace. Zed Books

Hawthorne, S., & Klein, R. (1999). Cyberfeminism. Melbourne, Australia, Spinifex.

Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Herring, Susan. “Politeness in Computer Culture: Why Women Thank and Men Flame,” in Cultural Performances: Proceedings of the Third
Berkeley Women and Language Conference, Mary Bucholtz et al., eds. Berkeley Women and Language Group, 1994.

Kendall, L. (2002) Hanging Out in the Virtual Pub: Masculinites and Relationships Online. Berkeley University of California Press.

Kolko, B. &. (2000). Race in Cyberspace. New York: Routledge.

Mulvey, Laura (1975). "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". Screen 16(3):6–18
https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/MarkTribe/Visual+Pleasure+and+Narrative+Cinema

Nakamura, Lisa. “Where Do You Want to Go Today?” Cybernetic Tourism, the Internet, and Transnationality” In Race In Cyberspace. Kolko, Beth, Nakamura, Lisa and Rodman, Gilbert eds. 2000 Great Britain Routledge


Raizada, Kristen. “An Interview with the Guerilla Girls, Dyke Action Machine (DAM!), and the Toxic Titties”. NWSA Journal 19.1 2007, 39-58

Rheingold, H. (1993). The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electornic Frontier. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.
Silver, David. (n.d.) “Introducing Cyberculture”. Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies.
http://rccs.usfca.edu/intro.asp

Silver (2000) Margins in the WIres: Looking for RAce, Gender and SExuality in the Balcksburg Electronic Village In Race In Cyberspace. Kolko, Beth, Nakamura, Lisa and Rodman, Gilbert eds. 2000 Great Britain Routledgep. 133

Sterne, Jonathon. The Computer RAce Goes to Class: How Computers in Schools Helped Shape the RAcial Topography of the Internet. In Race In Cyberspace. Kolko, Beth, Nakamura, Lisa and Rodman, Gilbert eds. 2000 Great Britain Routledge p.191-212

Thompson, C. (2008 September) "Brave New Worlds of Digital Intimacy" New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.html

Turkle, S. (1995). Life On The Screen. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Update-Project Changing

Greetings from St. Marks coffee shop in Denver, CO where I have been spending my day thesising and research-cha-ching for digital ethnography. Work - Work - Work.
Ok - So my project is changing. I am now focusing on 'ambient intimacy' and micro-celebrity. This is an area our project was lacking and something that is necessary to understanding identity online. Anonymous is a response to this micro-celebrity phenomenon caused by facebook etc. Doing this project is a good focus for me - a few years ago when I was a senior at UVM I did a proect for my gender and race in the media class on micro-celebrity. This class was taught by the lovely Helen Morgan-Parmett my former debate coach - and friend.
Click here to check out the project I did back in my groovy UVM days.

More coming soon - In the form of a literature review - ..............