When evangelizing about blogging (on a typical Monday evening), I like to slip in a modified version of Andy Warhol's prophecy: In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
Many in our society have experienced fifteen minutes -- or some similarly meager timeslice -- of fame, just as Warhol predicted. (Think of Big Brother or other reality TV shows.)
But another kind of fame is emerging, one where the slice of audience is small, not the time. Blogging has the potential to bestow exactly that kind of fame. The community of readers may not be a "mass" audience, but within that community, the blogger holds an important and respected position.
Community-sized fame is an ancient phenomenon rather than a futuristic one. Everybody’s from somewhere, after all, and we all know some big fishes in our small ponds. Here in Ireland, for example, the priest or schoolmaster was once a “famous” individual within his community (as was the druid, going further back).
Blog fame is novel in other ways: the reader community is virtual and geographically scattered (take a look at my guestmap!), while communication – the “oxygen” on which all fame depends – takes place through computers and network connections.
So I enjoyed the following quotation in an introduction to blogs splash on the BBC’s site:
| "If you want to reach millions you book an ad on TV," said Stefan Glanzer, one of the founders of blogging system 20six. "If you want to reach one person you use e-mail or the telephone. "But if you want to reach between 5 and 500 people a blog is the ideal tool to communicate," he said. |
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