Is it possible to be famous on the internet

By trying to inflate themselves with the electronic equivalent of silicon implants, fakers make the system noisy for everyone. We welcome your comments at ideas qz. By providing your email, you agree to the Quartz Privacy Policy. Skip to navigation Skip to content. Discover Membership. Editions Quartz. More from Quartz About Quartz. Follow Quartz. These are some of our most ambitious editorial projects.

From our Series. By Kevin Ashton. For others, fame is a means to an end. They want to be famous so people will buy their product, hire them to do something they love, or to influence others to support a cause they really care about.

They see promoting themselves and becoming a celebrity as a way to further their career, business, or other efforts, and nothing more. In many cases, these people would prefer not to be famous if they could be as effective in other ways. Read on to find out more. As mentioned above, some people want to be famous as a means to an end while others just want to be famous.

But why would you want to be Internet famous instead of old-fashioned, mainstream-media famous? Well, to some extent the question answers itself.

Becoming famous in a traditional sense is hard. All they have to do is click. It makes immediate action that much more likely. Taking a week or two to make some initial preparations before you start your quest to become Internet famous can save you a lot of headaches and hassles down the road. Next, set up a personal blog or website so your content is easily accessible. Then, interact with your fans on a daily basis through social media, which will inspire them to keep visiting your page.

For tips on how to become active in an online interest community, read on! Did this summary help you? Yes No. Log in Social login does not work in incognito and private browsers. Please log in with your username or email to continue. No account yet? Create an account. Edit this Article. We use cookies to make wikiHow great. By using our site, you agree to our cookie policy.

Cookie Settings. Learn why people trust wikiHow. Download Article Explore this Article parts. Related Articles. Article Summary. Part 1. There are a variety of different ways to become famous on the internet. Some popular ways are streaming gameplay online or making unique content in the form of videos or writing. Other famous internet stars are popular on social media.

Think of things that you like doing and create a strategy based on your skills. If you know a lot of different makeup techniques, you can create video content showing others how to apply makeup. If you are excellent at games then you can stream or create videos on YouTube to gain a fanbase. If you already spend a lot of time on social media, you should consider actively growing your social media followers to become famous.

If you think you have an interesting life you can create vlogs that people can follow. If you have an immense knowledge in a specific topic you can start a blog or create videos online to educate other people.

Watch people that you're a fan of. Another way to get inspired is by emulating someone that you look up to. If you don't follow any internet celebrities, start searching for them online to get a better idea of what you need to do to become famous. Look on websites like Twitch.

Do your research on the community you want to get into. Communities are made up of a variety of people who share the same interests and often share ideas and thoughts to one another.

Some people in the community make online content and become famous off that content. Also, within communities are sub-communities or niche communities that concentrate on more concentrated subject matter. Search for other content creator's social media profiles or any video or written content that they create.

If the content you plan on pursuing already has a lot of up-and-coming content producers or established stars, you may want to choose something else unless you bring something exciting and unique. Narrow down your choices and choose something to pursue. Think of your goals and decide if they are realistic. Estimate the probability of success within the community by evaluating your competition, the overall viewer base, and the popularity of your content platform.

Part 2. Stay consistent across all platforms. In the case of our young Russian lovebirds, one might safely assume that, until Bellingcat started snooping around their wedding videos, they had been spared the experience of the sudden burst of Internet fame.

But, like them, just about everyone is always dancing at the edge of that cliff, oblivious or not. A clever TikTok video can end up with forty million views. Fame itself, in the older, more enduring sense of the term, is still elusive, but the possibility of a brush with it functions as a kind of pyramid scheme. This, perhaps, is the most obviously pernicious part of the expansion of celebrity: ever since there have been famous people, there have been people driven mad by fame.

Being known by strangers, and, even more dangerously, seeking their approval, is an existential trap. And right now, the condition of contemporary life is to shepherd entire generations into this spiritual quicksand. Understanding the centrality of the desire for recognition is quite helpful in understanding the power and ubiquity of social media. We have developed a technology that can create a synthetic version of our most fundamental desire.

Why did the Russian couple post those wedding photos? Why do any of us post anything? Because we want other humans to see us, to recognize us. It articulates the paradox of what we might call not the Master and the Slave but, rather, the Star and the Fan. The Star seeks recognition from the Fan, but the Fan is a stranger, who cannot be known by the Star. There is no way to bridge the inherent asymmetry of the relationship, short of actual friendship and correspondence, but that, of course, cannot be undertaken at the same scale.

And so the Star seeks recognition and gets, instead, attention. The Star and the Fan are prototypes, and the Internet allows us to be both in different contexts. In fact this is the core, transformative innovation of social media, the ability to be both at once. You can interact with strangers, not just view them from afar, and they can interact with you. Those of us who have a degree of fame have experienced the lack of mutuality in these relationships quite acutely: the strangeness of encountering a person who knows you, who sees you, whom you cannot see in the same way.

But the psychological experience of fame, like a virus invading a cell, takes all of the mechanisms for human relations and puts them to work seeking more fame. This is why famous people as a rule are obsessed with what people say about them and stew and rage and rant about it. I can tell you that a thousand kind words from strangers will bounce off you, while a single harsh criticism will linger.

You might find Kevin Durant, one of the greatest basketball players on the planet, possibly in the history of the game—a multimillionaire who is better at the thing he does than almost any other person will ever be at anything—in the D. Not just once—routinely!

Everyone is losing their minds online because the combination of mass fame and mass surveillance increasingly channels our most basic impulses—toward loving and being loved, caring for and being cared for, getting the people we know to laugh at our jokes—into the project of impressing strangers, a project that cannot, by definition, sate our desires but feels close enough to real human connection that we cannot but pursue it in ever more compulsive ways.