The Poverty Jet Set

On Microcelebrity

Our friends Lord Whimsy and his wife Lady Pinkwater joined us recently for a soiree chez nous (at which those photos above were taken, making our big, drafty loft look all warm and cozy!). Whimsy and I got into a discussion about ‘microcelebrity‘ and what it means to us as media makers. After further reflection, he’s written a great post about it on his blog, and I encourage you to check it out if you’re interested in such matters.

A snippet:

The timing of this more recent article on microcelebrity seems a bit odd; this technology-fueled social phenomenon has been around for quite some time now, although it has certainly grown and intensified in recent years. We are all becoming more adept as self-mediators: It has become one of those necessary twenty-first century life skills, right up there with knowing a few key phrases of HTML or knowing how to put one’s cell phone on vibrate mode. To quote Clive Thompson: “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.” In the words of Quentin Crisp, we’ve learned to “urinate with style”.

On a side note, Whimsy’s amazing book “The Affected Provincial’s Companion, Vol. I” is going out of print soon, and I highly recommend you pick yourself up a copy before they disappear (or before they have the Johnny-Depp-Based-on-the-Book print run).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 at 11:20 am and is filed under books, friends, ideas, love!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.