The "me" in fame.

Seems everywhere I look these days, there it is. That 4-letter word. At every turn it's: Fame in the blogosphere. Fame in our genes. Fame as prime motivator.

According to some accounts, with the right number of provocative posts (at least 6 before lunchtime) and wrangling enough people to digg your posts, you too can be famous. Like Tom Cruise. Or Mel Gibson. Perhaps like Kevin Federline (uh, "K-Fed") you can marry into blogger fame. Or, like Star Jones, maybe you can get fired into blogger fame (Amanda will have to fill us in).

A couple of recent posts had some interesting takes on fame. Noah writes, "The game is changing, for a long time, the only difference between the stars and 'Joe Schmo' was the audience...but not any more". Vaspers pens, "As the commercialized, over-hyped Star System declines, we witness the Rise of Everyone."

While I agree with them both, it leads me to conclude that the democratization of content, and content-publishing tools, hasn't leveled the celebrity field...so much as deemed it irrelevant: because if everyone is a star then no one is.

That rings right since people were never the stars of Web 2.0. Fame is far too me-focused for a 2-way medium. But ideas are we-focused. Ideas are the stuff that memes, best practices and successful businesses are made of.

Since we're all participants and producers, we fuel one another. That's hard for a lot of people outside of the 'sphere to understand. And for some inside it, too. It's just not like other media. Thank goodness. 1 Tom Cruise is plenty.

Comments

[Noah Brier]

I think you're right, everything fuels everything else.

I've been thinking about convergence a lot lately. The line between producer and consumer is no longer meaningful, neither is the line between offline and online. We are coming closer to a point where we are just able to live our lives with the web as an element. For me, my online interactions drive offline interactions and vice-versa.

[vaspers the grate]

Average people now have the tools and networks to make their own products, promote and distribute them, especially online objects and downloadables.

Thanks to blogs, and only to blogs, the web is now fully democratizable, to usher in the Universal Content Utopia.

Business models for this new blogospheric/Web 2.0 user paradise?

One of the best is the All User Content product, like PostSecret. You do next to nothing, letting the users do all the work, which is posted freely to your blog, then assembled into a book, and possibly a blockbuster movie. Heh.

Get rich doing next to nothing is now viable. Not get rich quick, but get rich with the robots, RSS feeds, blog portal masters, and computer programs doing most of the work.

Blogger, you are an infobot, searching your consciousness, the internet, and offline sources for benefits to present to your readers. They contribute content to your blog via comments. So it's a We Media based on lots of Me Medias hooking up and sharing and caring.

[Noah Brier]

Vaspers and I must have been commenting at the same time because I didn't see it before.

I think saying "it's a We Media based on lots of Me Medias hooking up and sharing and caring" is a very important point. As Wisdom of Crowds so nicely explains, for the whole to smarter than its parts the individuals must be working off their own knowlege. The way I see it is that each of us is working for our own and the greater good comes from just that.

[Lewis Green]

Right on. It isn't about us: It is about our clients and customers, and it is about us meeting their wants, needs and desires. More important it is about us creating an experience for them deep with happiness.

[vaspers the grate]

Another way to put it is:

"It's not about Them anymore, it's about you and me and Us."

I like the teaching of Derrida's buddy Emmanuel Levinas who states that we are obligated to the Other (otherness and other people) prior to being born.

We are "Born to Serve". Not "Born to Seek Approval" or "Born to Dominate" or "Born to Crave", but birthed into a needy ocean of grief and turmoil.

Thus, the generous offerings of freeware, blog posts, and comments all combine to create a non-xenophobic realm of blogospheric cooperation, fact-policing, and authenticity verification.

Now we must all advance into more immediacy, more intimacy with our audience, for their benefit and not for our own "glory": via podcasts, photo galleries, mp3s, customized blog functions like user-created search engines, and video.

Why no Seth Godin, Chris Locke, Tom Peters, Harvey Mackay, etc. videos on YouTube?

YouTube is now a mandatory "ad medium" and promotional opportunity for all in business, not just lip-synching dancebot teens.