
Fame - holman
http://zachholman.com/posts/fame/
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aprrrr
Sure, technology is great and all, but the historical analysis is simplistic.

> A patrician in ancient Rome might be able to make a name for himself around
> his neighborhood over the course of his lifetime.

Caesar, Spartacus, Cicero, and Cato are known over 2000 years after they
lived. They are among the most famous people ever to have lived.

Our modern day "kings and emperors" retain vastly greater power and influence
than we commoners, and they have the best command & control and surveillance
systems in history. It is not at all clear whether information technology
advances of the last century have contributed more to democratization or
consolidation of power, Twitter notwithstanding.

~~~
telemachos
Yup, that sentence made me wince. For what it's worth, Caesar and Cato were
patricians. Spartacus was a slave (not even a Roman citizen), and Cicero was
an _eques_.

All four of them did pretty well. Julius Caesar in particular would have had
his name known from Britain to Parthia - one end of the known world to the
other. He did it the old fashioned way: he went out into the world and killed
people. (He was a hell of a writer too, but most of the people who knew his
name couldn't read.)

------
il
The other side of this is that because we're all so connected, there is a lot
of noise in the system. Your awesome app can and will get drowned out by the
collective output of millions of teenagers on their iPhones.

Although distribution methods have evolved considerably, most of the
traffic(and thus, the power) is still held by the same "old media" newspapers
and traditional Hollywood celebrities.

------
DanielBMarkham
It's great as long as you're the guy making the tweets, videos, and status
updates that hundreds of thousands of folks read, admire, and share. But if
you're some poor slob who did something stupid and are on the receiving end of
a viral attack? It deeply sucks in a way that having crowds mad at you has
never sucked before.

You don't get stuff for free. Yes, it's better, but cliques of hundreds of
thousands of people thinking in sync is pretty freaking scary too, if you ask
me. Have we all forgotten how mobs act?

~~~
zedshaw
This is why people who say "ignore the trolls" are idiots. The internet makes
trolling permanent and a mob affair. Your best strategy now is to fight back
with your own better words, pranks, and trolling or else everyone simply
assumes your silence means the mob is right.

Trust me on this, I am probably one of a handful of people who has been on the
receiving end of a massive hateful mob and managed to kick the living shit out
of them with just a blog and some hilarious jokes.

~~~
mobileman
Zed, I want to have your babies.

------
adambyrtek
This is more about the ability to broadcast your thoughts instead of having
actual power. I doubt that past kings and emperors, who held almost absolute
power over millions of people, would envy a modern self-centered teenager
venting on Twitter.

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larrywright
I'll probably regret asking this, but what is the tweet he's referring to?

~~~
holman
Hypothetical tweet. It was more for illustrating how retweets can take matters
into their own hands, so to speak.

~~~
c0riander
I can see where the confusion arises - I wondered too. Using the conditional
tense would help a lot here, unless there was a reason for creating the
impression that this was a real tweet.

So it would become:

>Today, a tenth grader who perhaps may not be our finest societal achievement
judging from a cursory glance at her neck tattoo that proudly proclaims “To
hot 4 you”, could drunkenly sit on her keyboard and mistakenly send out a
tweet that six hundred thousand people read within the hour.

------
misterinterrupt
Who are you talking about when you say "stop being so goddamn jaded"?

