#TheInternet: Makes you who you wana be?
Posted by Dan | Filed under Blog, Ideas, Thinking
I have spoken about the ‘Social Reality Show‘ in previous posts; the human obsession with the famous and the new tools celebrities use to gain media attention, but also the desire some people have to be an Internet star. It’s all possible with YouTube and Twitter. What Katie Wore and Shit my dad says are great examples of this.
Thinking about celebrity Twitter profiles, Facebook pages and MySpace profiles; what is the motivation for someone to pretend to be a celebrity and post as if they were them?
Is the motivation that some people behind the screen of their computer want this attention, they want the attention that major celebrities get? I think this in some ways ties back into what I wrote before about the ‘Social Reality Show’. Twitter introduced a ‘Verified’ element to their accounts. A seal of verification appears at the top of celebrities profiles when they have been validated to help stop this. That is the hard stop tactic, but I think we need to understand why people imitate in order to stop it (or if it can be).
When you were a child I am sure many of you pretended to be someone famous, either when scoring whilst playing football or some sort of role playing activity where you were Indiana Jones or the Karate Kid? Does the fact people create fake Twitter profiles mean that they want to ‘play’ at being Michael Owen for a bit longer, living their unfulfilled football dream, or as a supermodel to feel happy for a few moments?
Are we just talking about a different form of escapism here?
On a side note, does this also tie into ‘Nowism’? People want the feeling, the benefits, the attention, and they want it now? Social media by its nature has given us the opportunity to do this.
So maybe social media has widened the number of tools we have to escape?
Tags: escapism, facebook, Social Media, Twitter
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