Weinberger at ROFLCon: Fame in the age of ubiquity

David Weinberger, whom I’m a clear fan of to anyone who reads this bog, was the keynote speaker this afternoon at ROFLCon, which the organizers pronounce like roffle-con, not spell out like R - O - F - L- con, which is how I pronounce it.

(Photo by kevingc on flickr, creative commons attribution non-commercial share alike license).

See my rambling notes below:

He basically argued (riffing on many themes from Everything is Miscellaneous) that the internet has changed the nature of fame - that in the pre-internet, mass communications era, fame was incredibly scarce, and drew it’s power from scarcity - very few people could make someone famous, and the number of ways to become famous was very small.

This created a certain kind of fame we call celebrity, along with a bunch of notions of what that means.

But thanks to the internet, we are no longer are interested in the inhuman, they’re-not-like-us-they’re-so-different famous - we’re looking for real, homespun, authentic, not separate, one of us kind of famous.
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