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The forthcoming second post will be a primer for conceptualising the relationship between internet celebrity, visibility, and virality and the forthcoming third post will be a primer of rethinking the progression from internet celebrity to influencer.Īt the confluence of being chronic meme aficionados, internet research scholars, and educators to cohorts of young people, in 2017 my colleague Kristine Ask and I began a project to consider seriously the types of memes students share online. In the first of three short posts, I provide a primer for thinking about internet celebrity through definition frameworks. But we often forget that influencers are just one form of ‘internet celebrities’, or categorically conflate both concepts. These self-branded influencers are the epitome of ‘internet celebrities’ in that their fame is usually derived from positive self-branding, that followers consume their content aspirationally, that their public visibility is sustained and stable, and that the income they accumulate is lucrative enough to pursue influencer commerce as a full-time career. Their responses would almost unanimously comprise entirely of names of ‘social media influencers’ - the type of ‘internet-famous’ persons who generally produce social media content full-time as a living, using and repackaging material from their everyday lives as lived, modeling their lifestyles into a canvas onto which sponsored messages (be they products, services, or ideologies) can be interwoven and embedded. I often begin with a prompt asking these (mostly young) people to name me the first few local and international ‘internet celebrities’ off the top of their heads. This year, I have lectured and spoken to students in 16 cities across Asia, Australia, Europe, and the US. Nothing too dubious there, but it got me thinking about the long and dismal history of littering campaigns’ role in playing cover for corporate interests. His latest job helps veterans apply for and receive cheap mortgages.
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According to his Facebook profile, Román works in the non-profit home loan industry, mostly in marketing. When I started seeing Byron Román’s #trashtag trending on my usual platforms I did what any well-adjusted person would do: I assumed it was as scam and Facebook stalked him until I was convinced otherwise.
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It is unclear who the guy in the photo is (It looks like it came from a Guatemalan Travel Agency), but CNN, Washington Post, and CBS News have reported that “trashtag” is a long-dormant social media campaign for UCO Gear, a Seattle-based camping equipment company. Now #trashtag (“hashtag trashtag?”) is the subject of a dozen or so feel-good human interest stories. Reddit user Baxxo24 (Baxxo24 looks to be Swedish while Byron lives in Arizona) took a screenshot and posted it to r/wholesomememes where it went viral. Less than a week ago Byron Román made the above Facebook post challenging “bored teens” to pick up trash and post before and after photos on social media. The term “meme” is indeed a monosyllable, which resembles the word “gene”. Similarly, a meme can spread from one mind to another, and it can become popular in the cultural context of a given civilization. A gene is transmitted from one generation to another, and if selected, it can accumulate in a given population. Originally, the concept was proposed to describe an analogy between the “behaviour” of genes and cultural products. If the idea is brilliant, other philosophers may eventually decide to cite it in their essays and speeches, with the outcome of propagating it. For instance, anytime a philosopher ideates a new concept, their contemporaries interrogate it. Richard Dawkins, a notorious evolutionary biologist, coined it to describe “a unit of cultural content that is transmitted by a human mind to another” through a process that can be referred as “imitation”. The neologism is derived from the ancient Greek mīmēma, which means “imitated thing”. The term “meme” first appeared in the 1975 Richard Dawkins’ bestselling book The selfish gene.