The democratization of celebrity and the online experience
When surfing through YouTube and other Web 2.0 zones, I’m always struck by this recent explosive democratization of celebrity, thanks to the tools that have enabled online participatory culture. If it’s true, as Shakespeare wrote, that “some are born great, some achieve greatness, some have greatness thrust upon them,” then Web 2.0 has certainly increased the range of options to achieve fame, or to have fame thrust upon you (as in the Star Wars Kid).
As a result, more and more of us netizens are having celebrity experiences:
The private is public. Nothing is unknowable or off limits. And with mobile and visual devices becoming ever more ubiquitous (take a photo with your camera phone, wirelessly upload it and get it Dugg, all within seconds or minutes), the trend of declining privacy looks likely to continue. And just because your past life hasn’t been made public yet, doesn’t mean that it’s safely unreachable; your personal history is available to be unearthed and publicized to the extent that it’s documented or even simply exists in the memories of other people.
Your observers are unknown. Online, you can never be sure who’s watching. Private emails can be forwarded; passworded webpages can be screen-captured and posted elsewhere. You may tailor your communication to who you think is your audience at that moment, but your message can be detached out of the original exchange and replicated in other places and times, where it may take on very different connotations from its new context.
They know you, but you don’t know them. In the rest of life, there’s a balance of knowledge between two people in a relationship: you usually know roughly the same level of information about each other. Between a celebrity and the audience, there’s an imbalance. You/the celebrity is exposed, with that contradictory experience of both power and powerlessness; they/the audience are largely hidden or anonymous. Even if you know their online persona, that doesn’t mean you necessarily know how that part of their identity relates to the rest of their life.
You’re a brand, an object, a blip. When the online dynamic takes over, your story becomes just one more thing in the broader universe of content: you, today’s headline news, laundry detergent, the works. Everything becomes a drop in that endlessly flowing river of information.
You’re God or you’re the Devil. As a celebrity figure, you’re a caricature, not a real person. You’re seen a good example, a bad example, a poster child, the butt of a joke, a symbol, an icon, a fantasy, an inspiration. What you cannot be seen as, what’s lost under all the noise and levels of mediated experience, is the flesh-and-blood human being. And if you stop being God or the Devil, if you stop being an extreme (and therefore entertaining) example, you become boring, i.e. nothing and nobody.
Your name isn’t under your control. When you aren’t in the public eye, your own actions have the biggest impact on your reputation. The greater number of people who pay attention, the more the group dynamic overwhelms any action on your part. Your identity become subject to the interpretations of many (often anonymous) others.
But that doesn’t mean you have *no* control. What you do and say does have an influence. It still matters. It’s just no longer the sole or primary influence, as it is when you’re known only within a smaller circle of acquaintances.
You become a metric. Just as public figures are evaluated as successes or failure based on their box office receipts, number of votes in an election, etc., so too can online celebrities be ranked and rated by number of clicks, RSS subscribers, comments, etc. This reductionism can be both exhilarating and dehumanizing. As a society, we’re able to quantify our experiences more than ever, and there’s enormous power in that. But we also have a tendency to misuse, misunderstand, or even worship numbers in a way that can have negative effects.
A few books on the celebrity experience:
Intimate Strangers: 
The Unwanted Gaze: the Destruction of Privacy in America by Jeffrey Rosen.
Fame Junkies:
The Frenzy of Renown: