D: DEMOCRATIC FAME DISTRIBUTION
SINCE WEB 2.0, SELF-PROMOTION IS CHILD’S PLAY. NOW EVERYONE iS FAMOUS ON THE NET!
One of our first FaceBook profile pix was a black box with white Impact font. It read: “We are all beautiful on FaceBook!” Back in 2007, the average Internet user had never heard of Web 2.0. Lots of people still don’t. Simply put, Web 1.0 offered the user content; Web 2.0 content is offered by the user.Suddenly, people have a way to market themselves.
Personal branding is accessible to all. Warhol’s idea of fifteen minutes of fame replaced by fifteen thousand friends!Fame is dubious. Back home in Belgium, there’s a saying: “Oh, sure, everybody knows him. He’s world famous on his own street!”
Fame is so common today, everyone knows someone who is “famous.” Someone who was on television! Someone who in a singing or dancing contest, popular at open mic! You’re a lucky artist to live at the beginning of the new fame culture.Someone who earned some notoriety, Sharon Osbourne revealed in a 2010 interview:
“Today, young people regard fame as a birthright. They have a sense of entitlement the size of one of my houses. I recently heard about the work of an American psychologist who discovered that in the Fifties, only twelve percent of youngsters agreed with the statement ‘I am an important person.’ By the end of the Eighties, that figure rose to eighty percent. I think we can all guess what it is now… Children leaving school today no longer want to become doctors or lawyers or architects. All I ever hear is ‘I wanna be famous’, or ‘I wanna be a celeb.’”
Hence, the success of social networks. People tend to use the easiest way to achieve their goals. The best way though, is the hard way, the path of self control. You don’t need someone else to tell you if you’re any good. Make a video, post it, and you see what happens.Write a song, post it, and see how the world reacts. Tell your friends where you are, how much fun you have, and start collecting thumbs up marketing your personal life. Make your life famous. Spread your name and art. Run up as many blogs or websites about your art as you want. Promote yourself for free on every kind of forum. Advertise. Gain fans on defined structures. Avail yourself to the viral possibilities of the net. This is just the beginning.
Fully optimize existing structures knowing there’s more to come. Be ready to surf the new wave. It may knock unexpectedly!
