Social Media Enables Our Endless Pursuit of Fame

Social media is the new "enabler".

We live in a culture filled with individuals, brands, and corporations, all trying to get their time in the spotlight. Some are hoping for fame because they're backing a good cause. Some are trying to sell a product. Some are endorsing a celebrity, musician, artist, or otherwise noteworthy individual. Regardless of the purpose, publicity as a whole is about helping consumers to talk about your brand. We're ALL in the race to get others to talk about us.

Our new social media channels (must I mention them again? Sigh.) Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and the general blogosphere, among others, are filled with millions of people all talking or posting about whatever it is that interests them. With every insightful, interesting user, each of these sites also offers a robot, a stream of spam, or a real person who babbles about nothing.

Given our country's worship and idolization of celebrities, it comes as no surprise that social media can be compared to each citizen's attempt to get a little famous.

I have long been a supporter of the way networking sites allow normal people to interact with brands, celebrities, and other people or organizations they admire. How cool is in that I could write a tweet mentioning Perez Hilton, and he would respond? This happened to a friend of mine. Another friend of mine was able to correspond with an athlete she admires -- about dry cleaning!

There has to be a tradeoff to having instant connections to the celebs we worship. CNN suggests that our obsession with fame is fueled by the ability to contact celebrities, and then we spend the rest of our time on social media trying to produce the same effects as we experienced once when we wrote on Taylor Lautner's Facebook Fan page, and a representative of his responded to us personally.

Social media is the tool that enables us to continue our celebrity obsession, and by interacting with the stars we admire, we get to feel a little famous ourselves.

I can't really judge, though, since I often tweet @johncmayer and PRAY he responds.

Celebrity Death Rumors Rage On

"Like, oh my gosh guys, did you see that Kanye West died this week?! Yeah, R.I.P. Kanye."

"There was a car crash! R.I.P. Kanye West"

"What's with this new trending topic.... Kanye West died? What a loss."

Sound familiar?

How about:

"R.I.P. Zach Braff! CNN says he committed suicide!"

"I can't believe it, did Zach Braff really die?"

"Zach Braff was my FAVE actor. Garden State. oh em gee"

Okay, even I fell for the Zach Braff one for a couple of minutes. That fake CNN page, which now displays an apology from its creator, fooled me! The only laughable part of the situation was Zach Braff's YouTube response.

Over the past few months, Twitter has been the origin of a plethora of celebrity death rumors, including rumors about Kanye West, Miley Cyrus, Zach Braff, and Jeff Goldblum, to name a few. This has caused a growing buzz among social media addicts and many Twitter users, questioning the accountability and validity of Twitter and the news it spreads.

In Kanye West example, MTV posted an article openly declaring the rumors as untrue, the day before "R.I.P. Kanye West" became a trending topic. Yet the story still spread.

Such rumors seem to have cropped up (as far as I can tell) in much larger quantities within the last four months or so. Why? I can think of two reasons.

1. Uh, there are more people on Twitter! More spammers and bots, too.
2. Michael Jackson's death spread like wildfire on Twitter. In fact, I first heard about MJ's death via Twitter, from a friend who was posting a link from @HarveyLevinTMZ's Twitter account. TMZ actually had the story before CNN. CNN and TMZ reported his hospitalization around the same time, but TMZ, and in turn Twitter were at least 20 minutes ahead of CNN with news of his death. I was fascinated by this--how could CNN have allowed that to happen with such a huge story? The most obvious answer is that CNN had paused to verify facts and gather more information; Twitter had not.

The service has responded to all this false information with a variety of tactics, such as geographical tracking of tweets and a reputation system to rank users by trustworthiness.

Yesterday, Google announced its intention to include tweets within its search results. Glenn Batuyong comments on the Mashable article: "Congrats to Twitter! Let's hope that somehow this deal will improve Twitter's general reliability (HINT) but does this mean that fake garbage like 'RIP Kanye West' will be top SERPs on Google?"

Couldn't have said it better myself. Should be interesting to watch what happens!

Social Media's Impact on Methods of Contact

Yesterday I was watching Swingers, a popular 1996 comedy starring Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn.

One of the ongoing themes of the film is that Favreau's character, Mike, has an obsession with checking his voicemail. Since the film is largely focused on dating and dating etiquette, there were multiple scenes where Mike would get home and check his answering machine obsessively -- did his ex-girlfriend call? Did the girl he met at the bar call? What should he say when leaving voicemail for other women? What happens when the answering machine cuts him off? Should he call back? Will the woman pick up while he is talking to their machine? Who should he put on hold, his ex or the woman from the bar?

Mike was completely dependent on his voicemail, and his home telephone in general, to keep him in contact with anyone and everyone.

I was struck by how hugely social media has changed the landscape of communication today.

I suppose this movement can be separated into a few specific changes, mostly technological advances.

1. Caller ID may not qualify as what I think of today as "social media", but it definitely changed the way we communicate by being able to screen calls and choose who we talk to and when.
2. The cell phone is an obvious one. You no longer have to be sure someone is at home in order to talk to them.
3. E-mail: see You've Got Mail for example. This altered the landscape of communication drastically.
4. MySpace, regardless of its popularity (or lack thereof) today, was in many ways the beginning of online communication as we know it. This trailblazing social media site opened up huge possibilities. In respect to dating, this opens the questions way beyond voicemail: What does it mean if he/she sends me a message versus writing on my page? What if they put up pictures of us? If their status says "in a relationship", why did they flirt with me? Etc. etc. What does the message they wrote on their number #4's wall (via Top 8) mean?
5. Oh, Facebook. Obvious changes include the ability to link to another user in your relationship status, the ability to tag someone in pictures, and all the glorious poking.
6. "Following" another user on Twitter is arguably a pretty casual method of contact. Maybe this is a good way to contact the guy/girl you met on Friday night, rather than a phone call?

This list is certainly not exhaustive. Any other changes you all think are monumental to the current picture of communication?

Anybody else ever feel amazed by how much social media has opened up our streams of communication? Today, instead of checking my home phone's voicemail, I have to pay attention to Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, maybe Myspace, and my cell phone.

Remember what Drew Barrymore's character Mary said in He's Just Not That Into You? "I had this guy leave me a voicemail at work, so I called him at home, and then he e-mailed me to my BlackBerry, so I texted to his cell, and now you just have to go around checking all these different portals just to get rejected by seven different technologies. It's exhausting."