'Wiki Celebrity'

You’re probably wondering what this is and what it means and how it is relevant to you.

Let me start with how it is relevant to you.  If you’re a member on Twitter (and I’m talking about an active member – not a ‘lurker’), you are probably gathering a small following depending on how often you tweet and what it is that you tweet.

‘Wiki Celebrity’ basically started a few years ago.  It’s not a proper term, but it may be used loosely to describe people using digital media to create their own genre of entertainment for the purpose of gaining a following. 

I used Twitter as an example earlier.  Many of us on Twitter follow people or organisations which we are interested in.  We follow friends to get instant updates (by ‘instant’ I mean, “yes, I do own a smartphone”), we follow news corporations to get breaking news and may follow the progression of stories at our own leisure, and most of us (yes, most of us - even though you’re probably cringing and hiding this fact) follow celebrities.

Why do we do it?

It provides a kind of satisfaction, knowing that you are getting instant messages (not directly to you, but hey, we can dream…) and updates of their life, even though they are the most ordinary things ever.  For example (don’t mistake these people for the celebrities I follow): 

• Jake Gyllenhaal: “My internet is being SO slow right now...” 
• Ashton Kutcher: “It's official tea is the new coffee.”
• Taylor Kitsch: “Just changed my picture but it stretched my face out!!! What's wrong with Twitter?”

And my personal favourite (oops, I think I just gave myself away)

• Jesus: “Oh my God I totally forgot it's Fathers Day!”

                                                                                                 

Completely ordinary right?  And yet we follow them anyway.  It provides the feeling of ‘closeness’, of an almost one-to-one conversation, even though its only going one way and those unreplied tweets piling up to that hot actor is not a hint that he’s not interested.  Oh no, no, no! He’s just busy =)

Phew, anyway…

Back to the topic at hand: ‘wiki celebrity’.  This term is usually not associated with legitimate celebrities but more of the followers or fans, or just plain ordinary people like you (not me).

What wiki celebrities have done is to take the same underlying values which ground legitimate celebrities as famous, and used them to promote themselves, their avatars or their surroundings.  The media nowadays is participatory and this is the main force behind wiki celebrities.

It started out as a guy (Justin Kan) walking around with a camera strapped to his head.  He hardly ever turned the camera on himself, but focused on his surroundings.  It got huge hits and many followers, so he continued on a regular basis.

This is what happens when you post videos on social video sites such as YouTube and you get a following – there becomes a demand.  This is, I believe, the difference between a celebrity and a wiki celebrity – the one is the provider of gossip, slander and inspiration and the other is attuned to the culture’s needs and desires.  Where the one is unchanging, the other is completely volatile and vulnerable to the audience.

Keep checking on your weird, kinky, gross, embarrassing and entertaining-as-hell videos on your social network and perhaps you may become SA’s newest wiki celebrity.

Bye for now (I need to urgently delete some tweets, completely unrelated to this blog)