February 11, 2015 | Arts / Entertainment

Fame more fleeting than ever before

Hoping to one day find your fifteen minutes of fame? Well, according to a recent article in the New York Times, you might have to settle for fifteen seconds, or less! There's even a term for it: nanofame. 

Because of the Internet, it is easier than ever to get your voice out there. You can create a funny video. You can send the perfect tweet. You can pull off a celebrity selfie. And if enough people like it, you go viral.

Problem is, you and a zillion (literally a zillion, we did the math) other people are fighting for the same crowd, so getting noticed isn't easy. And once you do, someone else comes along and steals your thunder. You will likely become nothing more than an obscure footnote on the Interweb.

As writer Alex Williams points out, there are lots of examples of individuals rising from obscurity only to fade away just as quickly.

Jeremy Meeks

Jeremy Meeks is the perfect example. He's the hot felon who made hearts swoon around the world. He was super hot, and his bad boy image seemed to help rather than hurt his popularity.

Williams wrote: "... the photograph of the 30-year-old “mug shot hottie” ricocheted around the web, from the Facebook page of the police department in Stockton, Calif., to a Twitter hashtag #FelonCrushFriday to, soon after, stories on “The Colbert Report” and “Good Morning America.” Mr. Meeks signed with an agent who was quoted in The Daily News saying that he could earn up to $100,000 a month for modeling and other gigs."

And now? He's apparently in prison, so you probably won't be seeing him on any billboards or TV ads anytime soon.

Chris Crocker's "Leave Britney Alone!" video has been watched over 48 million times.

Of course, there are many other examples. Chris Crocker, made famous by his whining rant demanding people "leave Britney alone!", is now doing gay porn. And who knows what happened to the teen cutie Alex from Target? He's probably back as a cashier (if he ever was one to begin with).

It's called nanofame. It's quick. It lasts as long as a Vine video (8 seconds for those of you not in the know). And these insta-celebs are only really known by their followers; the rest of the world is basically clueless to their existence.

“When the number of competing media platforms multiply from a few big ‘networks for all,’ like Myspace and Facebook, to, say, hundreds of smaller ones geared toward niche interests, it opens up more prospects of fame for more individuals, although on a smaller scale and at a more fleeting pace than before,” Brad Kim, editor of editor of the Know Your Meme site, said. 

It's no wonder then, that true "porn stars" are becoming rarer with each passing year.  

You can read more about the nanofame phenomenon here

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