A few years ago internet researcher David Weinberger attempted to explain the differences between broadcast fame and internet fame. Fame, he says, is a product of the broadcast era. Fame is built on the assumption of one to many communication — that I am able to speak to all of you, but you’re not able to speak back to me. According to Weinberger, Internet fame is completely different – it is participatory. On the Internet Televisa doesn’t get to decide who is famous — we all do. People are made famous because we cite them on Twitter, we link to their blog posts and videos.
Andy Warhol once said that we all wanted to be famous for 15 minutes. That is, we all wanted to receive our limited 15 minutes of broadcast fame on television or radio. David Weinberger says that on the Internet we will all be famous to 15 people – those who follow us on Twitter, YouTube, and our blogs. It is a democratic & egalitarian view of how attention is distributed on the Internet, but, in fact, it rarely works out that way. A new study of Twitter content consumption by Yahoo Research found that more than 50% of the content that is actually read on Twitter is produced by just .05% of users. In other words, there are around 20,000 elite users who are responsible for more than half of what is read on Twitter.
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