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A few years ago, former Gawker blogger Emily Gould wrote a New York Times Magazine piece about her life as a blogger, and reflected at lengthy upon the awkwardness of Internet fame, such as such fame is. She related an anecdote about struggling to explain that "fame" to someone who, predictably, just didn't understand:
"'It’s important to remember that you’re not a celebrity,' she told me. How could I tell her, without coming off as having delusions of grandeur, that, in a way, I was? I obviously wasn’t 'famous' in the way that a movie star or even a local newscaster or politician is famous — I didn’t go to red-carpet parties or ride around in limos, and my parents’ friends still had no idea what I was talking about when I described my job — but I had begun to have occasional run-ins with strangers who knew what I did for a living and felt completely comfortable walking up to me on the street and talking about it."
I totally know how she felt.
Which is not to say that I'm famous, because, you know, I'm not. At least, I'm not "famous" in the way that a movie star, or even a Snooki, is. I don't go to red carpet parties, and I'm not followed around by cameras and a lot of people still have no idea what I'm talking about when I describe my job ... but I have had more than a few run-ins with total strangers who know what I do for a living and feel comfortable walking up to me on the street -- or at the airport or in the grocery store or at the playground -- and talking about it. But that's kind of hard to talk about without coming off as having delusions of grandeur, you know?
So, yeah. That. That is awkward and uncomfortable to talk about, because that -- being well-known for writing about your life on the Internet -- is such a bizarre and implausible thing; the kind of thing that, to the wrong ears, sounds completely deluded, to say nothing of egotistical and self-aggrandizing. But that is something that is more and more common the more the Internet and social media and all the tools and doodads that support those things become central to our lives. There are, simply, more and more people becoming better known for doing this thing that we do, here, in our sweatpants, in the brightly lit spaces of the Interwebs. Which is why we need to start talking about what means to get attention in these spaces, what it means to be Internet famous. Or, at least, Internet well-known-ish.
I'm not hugely famous on the Internet. I'm not a widely-cited social media expert, nor am I the sort of lifecasting blogger that Gawker regularly covers (and likes to refer to as "fameballs"). I don't have hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers, I've never been on Oprah, and I'm certainly not in the league of Dooce. But my blog has been mentioned, more than once, in the New York Times and the Washington Post and on the BBC and CNN and across a variety of publications, and I get asked to appear on television and, yes, people do approach me in public, in my own city and in others and in quite a few airports in between. So, yeah: Some people would say that I'm kind of sort of well-known, for whatever that's worth.
And what is that worth? Not in terms of dollars -- one can be Internet well-known and not make one's living from it (that's not me, but still) -- but in terms of, well, what it all means and whether it's worth it (whatever "it" really is) and how one copes and how one keeps from becoming bitter or exhausted or ridiculous or big-headed or insufferable or (as I heard someone at SXSW call it) just an all-out "social media d-bag", the Internet equivalent of the "stars" of Jersey Shore. Or all of the above.
All I can say to that is: It's worth something, and nothing, and it matters not at all, but also a lot, and it's very, very hard to not have your head turned by excess amounts of attention and when you come home from wherever and tell your spouse that someone
