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Mike Wesch

Clive Thompson on the Age of Microcelebrity: Why Everyone's a Little Brad Pitt - 0 views

www.wired.com/...st_thompson

microcelebrity internetfamous

shared by Mike Wesch on 18 Feb 09 - Cached
  • Mike Wesch on 18 Feb 09
     
    But I think these gloomy predictions are probably wrong. The truth is that people are developing interesting social skills to adapt to microfame. We're learning how to live in front of a crowd. If you really want to see the future, check out teenagers and twentysomethings. When they go to a party, they make sure they're dressed for their close-up - because there will be photos, and those photos will end up online. In managing their Web presence, they understand the impact of logos, images, and fonts. And they're increasingly careful to use pseudonyms or private accounts when they want to wall off the more intimate details of their lives. (Indeed, fully two-thirds of teenagers' MySpace accounts are private and can be viewed by invitation only.)
Mike Wesch

YouTube - Tay Zonday's Thoughts on 4chan! Prank - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

microcelebrity TayZonday 4chan b anonymous interview video

shared by Mike Wesch on 23 Jan 09 - Cached
  • Mike Wesch on 23 Jan 09
     
    Tay Zonday was made famous by 4chan (when they spiked his views on Chocolate Rain) - check 1:10 for the story direct from Tay Zonday.
Jessica Rittenhouse

YouTube - "American Idle" - Numa Numa - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

NumaNuma fun GaryBrolsma

shared by Jessica Rittenhouse on 23 Jan 09 - Cached
  • Jessica Rittenhouse on 23 Jan 09
     
    Just for fun, as we've talked so much about microcelebrity and Gary Brolsma, and how people want to be famous on shows like American Idol. I found this and thought everyone would like it.
Mike Wesch

The Decline and Fall of the Private Self - 0 views

proquest.umi.com/pqdweb

self anonymity secrecy privacy fame microcelebrity

shared by Mike Wesch on 26 Jan 09 - Cached
  • IRONICALLY, HUMANS NOW ENJOY MORE privacy than ever, says Aaron Ben-Ze'ev, president of the University of Haifa and author of Love Online: Emotions on the Internet. "Two hundred years ago, when people lived in villages or very dense cities, everyone's behavior was evident to many and it was extremely hard to hide it," he says. Today, e-mail and "chatting" online allow for completely anonymous interactions. We can talk and make plans without the whole household or office knowing. But if we're so able to keep things to ourselves, then why are we doing exactly the opposite?
  • the Internet can be more disinhibiting than the stiffest drink
  • "We've been shaped to be very sensitive to each other on a face-to-face basis," says Daniel Wegner, a Harvard psychologist When someone is in front of you, you can read how they're reacting to your admissions, keeping track-as you're hardwired to do-of whether they're comfortable, disapproving, or rapt. But when you're alone in a room and typing on a computer, explains Wegner, it's easy to forget there's somebody on the other end of the line and become oblivious to the consequences of sharing information.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Perhaps we simply have less to be ashamed of in an increasingly free-to-be-you-and-me era. "More and more people believe they are entitled to behave according to their own values and not the norms prevailing in society," Ben-Ze'ev says. That means there is less of a need to keep a protected private self, free from the scrutiny of strangers.
  • Nor do self-disclosers feel sheepish about craving the spotlight. "I've always thought of myself as being in a movie, that my world is larger than life," says Schaeffer.
  • Bookstores and talk shows have long trafficked in the confessions of not-necessarily-notables, but the Internet has democratized and amplified personal gut spilling. Web sites such as postsecret.com and mysecret.tv bring bathroom-wall-variety confessions, such as "I only love two of my children," "I had gay sex at church camp," and "I pee in the sink," to-and from-the masses. Meanwhile, teenagers telegraph their deep thoughts and petty observations for YouTube prowlers hungry for novelty and diversion.
Katie Hines

Going Up? - 0 views

proquest.umi.com/pqdweb

anonymity fame microcelebrity

shared by Katie Hines on 25 Jan 09 - Cached
  • Katie Hines on 25 Jan 09
     
    A short article about the relationship between "average" people and celebrities. Hanson makes interesting observations about the behavioral effects of being famous.
Mike Wesch

MPR: The selfish generation? - 0 views

minnesota.publicradio.org/...midmorning2

generationy debate microcelebrity narcissism

shared by Mike Wesch on 17 Feb 09 - Cached
  • Mike Wesch on 17 Feb 09
     
    around 12:50 - question about the internet, american idol, etc.
Mike Wesch

Urban Dictionary: zub'lebrity - 0 views

www.urbandictionary.com/define.php

microcelebrity

shared by Mike Wesch on 17 Feb 09 - Cached
  • Mike Wesch on 17 Feb 09
     
    The Z-list
Mike Wesch

Are the Creators of Twitter Living in the Last Dreamworld on Earth? -- New York Magazine - 0 views

nymag.com/...index2.html

twitter ambientintimacy microcelebrity microblogging

shared by Mike Wesch on 13 Feb 09 - Cached
  • That is to say: Are we really becoming a nation of people who reflexively share information with everyone the minute we have it? We might be. Twitter has no choice but to hope so. They might be right.
  • He would have been vilified by bloggers and Twitterers alike. His is a culture of sharing information. This is the culture Twitter is counting on. Whatever your thoughts on its ability to exist outside the collapsing economy or its inability (so far) to put a price tag on its services, that’s a real thing. That’s the instinct Stone was talking about. If the nation has tens of millions of people like Krums, that’s a phenomenon. That’s what Twitter is waiting for.
  • On his personal blog, Krums, five days before the crash, posted that one of his goals for 2009 was to “Have over 1000 followers on Twitter,” adding, “this goal has no real purpose other that to prove that I can do it. It will make me feel better about myself.” Needless to say, after the crash, it worked: He’s at more than 4,000.
  • Mike Wesch on 13 Feb 09
     
    That is to say: Are we really becoming a nation of people who reflexively share information with everyone the minute we have it? We might be. Twitter has no choice but to hope so. They might be right.
Mike Wesch

Facebook: 25 Things I Didn't Want to Know About You - TIME - 0 views

www.time.com/...0,8599,1877187,00.html

microcelebrity narcissism

shared by Mike Wesch on 06 Feb 09 - Cached
  • Greta on 06 Feb 09
     
    Perhaps an example of the "overshare" that begins to occur with the saturated self? Interesting to see a perspective that's against connecting through this medium.
Mike Wesch

Web ushers in age of ambient intimacy - Print Version - International Herald Tribune - 0 views

www.iht.com/...printfriendly.php

ambient intimacy thompson required

shared by Mike Wesch on 13 Jan 09 - Cached
Yann Leroux liked it
  • In essence, Facebook users didn't think they wanted constant, up-to-the-minute updates on what other people are doing. Yet when they experienced this sort of omnipresent knowledge, they found it intriguing and addictive. Why?
  • Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it "ambient awareness."
  • The growth of ambient intimacy can seem like modern narcissism taken to a new, supermetabolic extreme
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends' and family members' lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like "a type of ESP," as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.
  • ad hoc, self-organizing socializing.
  • The Japanese sociologist Mizuko Ito first noticed it with mobile phones: lovers who were working in different cities would send text messages back and forth all night
  • You could also regard the growing popularity of online awareness as a reaction to social isolation, the modern American disconnectedness that Robert Putnam explored in his book "Bowling Alone."
  • "Things like Twitter have actually given me a much bigger social circle. I know more about more people than ever before."
  • Online awareness inevitably leads to a curious question: What sort of relationships are these? What does it mean to have hundreds of "friends" on Facebook? What kind of friends are they, anyway?
  • Dunbar noticed that ape groups tended to top out at 55 members. Since human brains were proportionally bigger, Dunbar figured that our maximum number of social connections would be similarly larger: about 150 on average
  • where their sociality had truly exploded was in their "weak ties"
  • "I outsource my entire life," she said. "I can solve any problem on Twitter in six minutes."
  • She also keeps a secondary Twitter account that is private and only for a much smaller circle of close friends and family — "My little secret," she said. It is a strategy many people told me they used: one account for their weak ties, one for their deeper relationships.)
  • Psychologists have long known that people can engage in "parasocial" relationships with fictional characters, like those on TV shows or in books, or with remote celebrities we read about in magazines. Parasocial relationships can use up some of the emotional space in our Dunbar number, crowding out real-life people.
  • Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society who has studied social media for 10 years, published a paper this spring arguing that awareness tools like News Feed might be creating a whole new class of relationships that are nearly parasocial — peripheral people in our network whose intimate details we follow closely online, even while they, like Angelina Jolie, are basically unaware we exist.
  • "These technologies allow you to be much more broadly friendly, but you just spread yourself much more thinly over many more people."
  • She needs to stay on Facebook just to monitor what's being said about her. This is a common complaint I heard, particularly from people in their 20s who were in college when Facebook appeared and have never lived as adults without online awareness. For them, participation isn't optional. If you don't dive in, other people will define who you are.
    • Mike Wesch
      Mike Wesch on 16 Feb 09
       
      like PR for the microcelebrity
  • "It's just like living in a village, where it's actually hard to lie because everybody knows the truth already," Tufekci said. "The current generation is never unconnected. They're never losing touch with their friends. So we're going back to a more normal place, historically. If you look at human history, the idea that you would drift through life, going from new relation to new relation, that's very new. It's just the 20th century."
  • Psychologists and sociologists spent years wondering how humanity would adjust to the anonymity of life in the city, the wrenching upheavals of mobile immigrant labor — a world of lonely people ripped from their social ties. We now have precisely the opposite problem. Indeed, our modern awareness tools reverse the original conceit of the Internet. When cyberspace came along in the early '90s, it was celebrated as a place where you could reinvent your identity — become someone new.
  • "If anything, it's identity-constraining now," Tufekci told me. "You can't play with your identity if your audience is always checking up on you.
  • "You know that old cartoon? 'On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog'? On the Internet today, everybody knows you're a dog! If you don't want people to know you're a dog, you'd better stay away from a keyboard."
  • Young people today are already developing an attitude toward their privacy that is simultaneously vigilant and laissez-faire. They curate their online personas as carefully as possible, knowing that everyone is watching — but they have also learned to shrug and accept the limits of what they can control.
  • Many of the avid Twitterers, Flickrers and Facebook users I interviewed described an unexpected side-effect of constant self-disclosure. The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you're feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It's like the Greek dictum to "know thyself," or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness.
Mike Wesch

List of Internet phenomena - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...List_of_Internet_phenomena

anonymous internet phenomena microcelebrity celebrity

shared by Mike Wesch on 02 Jan 09 - Cached
  • Anonymous - (used as a mass noun) is a label and Internet meme adopted within Internet culture to represent the actions of many online community users acting anonymously usually toward a loosely agreed-upon goal. It is generally considered as a blanket term – not tied to any monolithic group – for the vox populi or members of the Internet culture
  • 2channel — A Japanese Internet forum (the largest in the world). The site has significant influence on Japanese culture and popular opinion.[100] 4chan — The English equivalent to Futaba Channel, responsible for creating many popular Internet memes.[101]
    • Mike Wesch
      Mike Wesch on 02 Jan 09
       
      We may want a comparison ethnography of 2channel if anybody is up for it.
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