The New Celebrity

In this day and age there is a new definition of the “15 minutes of fame” and celebrity (or as I like to call it cele-brate-me). When anyone can be a star on YouTube or MySpace with something scandalous, funny or just plain offensive it is easy for people to feel as though they are somehow relevant to the world in a way they could not be before.
In the past in order to be famous or even infamous, major news media outlets all had to agree that your content was worthy of the small amount of space available on the evening news. You needed a record deal to produce and release main stream music, a contract with a major movie studio to appear in a film or a story so amazing that it would be written about in the local or maybe national newspaper.
Now with the tremendous success of reality television and the advances of the internet and computers, you can simply photograph or video yourself, often using your home computer or inexpensive digital camera, and post it anywhere on the internet for all to see. You can also be captured on surveillance cameras doing all sorts of things you would not have been seen doing previously and billions of dollars have been made taping the escapades of college girls during their spring break drunkenness.
When anyone can be infamous for just about anything what in the years to come will be the new definition of “celebrity”? My guess is that it will be anyone who manages not to permanently sabotage their dignity in Cyberspace by getting caught or posting things that, years from now, they will regret and would likely rather forget they had done.