Almost famous: Your guide to becoming an Internet celebrity
By Lindsey Rivait
Editor at Large
September 19, 2007
 Have you ever wanted to be famous but are too geeky, lanky, strange, fashion-impaired or chubby to make it to the big times in Hollywood? Thanks to the Internet, these normal characteristics won’t hinder your chances of fame any longer. If you can take a photo of yourself in a bathroom mirror or upload a video of yourself singing a catchy repetitive tune, you too could be an Internet celebrity.
What is an Internet celebrity?
An Internet celebrity is someone who is widely known within members of an Internet community. Even though these people are known among only a small percentage of the population, they still attract a lot of attention through their links and videos being passed around. An Internet celebrity would never be famous in real life but, because of the ease with which information can be passed on-line, have become recognizable figures. Many teens and young Internet-savvy adults use MySpace, YouTube, and other similar sites to promote themselves with the intention of becoming an Internet celebrity.
The Internet is an immediate medium. You can post a reaction about something as soon as it happens. Information is shared and spread at an alarmingly fast rate. And with digital cameras and camera phones all over the place, it seems like someone is always watching.
Learn from the masters
Love them or hate them, Internet celebrities will never go away. Many of them are offered admittance into real stardom, which only encourages more web celebs to pop up.
For example, Adam Bahner, better known as Tay Zonday, is a musician and vocalist who uses YouTube to promote his music, most notably his single, Chocolate Rain. Zonday croons his statement on racism in his deeper-than-Barry-White voice. The message is serious but the catchy tune and subtitles have made it more humourous than anything. The quirky video’s subtitles alert the viewer to the fact that Zonday moves away from the microphone to breathe in. The video gained popularity after people began viewing it as comedy and caught the attention of millions of Internet users.
Zonday performed on Jimmy Kimmel Live’s Internet Talent Week as a result of the popularity of his YouTube videos. Chocolate Rain has been parodied and covered by people like John Mayer and Green Day’s Tré Cool. In real life, Zonday is a doctoral candidate at the University of Minnesota.
Alongside Zonday in Internet fame is Jessica Lee Rose, an American actress known best as Lonelygirl15. Her online persona, Bree, was a lonely, home-schooled 16-year-old who used YouTube to videoblog about her deepest feelings. The series was told through short videoblogging clips from various users. Because of the way YouTube works, audience members can upload their own videoblogs as a response to Lonelygirl15’s blogs and also interact with each other in the comments section and through private messaging.
 Many people believed the Lonelygirl15 videos were real, but they were produced by a professional team comprised of filmmaker and screenwriter Ramesh Flinders, filmmaker Miles Beckett, and former attorney Greg Goodfried. The revelation that 16-year-old Bree was actually 19-year-old Rose upset viewers, many not returning to watch the series unfold.
Lonleygirl15’s first season ended in a special 12-part feature on August 3, 2007. Bree is killed off in some weird cult-related goings-on that her parents were a part of but that Bree and company were trying to resist. Suddenly, my journal from when I was 16-years-old seems a lot more boring.
Rose has gone on to appear in the ABC Family show, “Greek,” and the movie, “I Know Who Killed Me,” alongside Lindsay Lohan.
Other Internet celebrities are landing their own shows as well. Before Jeffree Star was a gender-bending cross dresser from Los Angeles who dubbed himself “Queen of the Internet,” he was known as Jeffrey Steininger. Star began wearing makeup to school when he was in junior high. He began his career as a makeup artist at 15 when he started dressing and making himself up as an underage club kid.
Star has done the makeup of such celebrities as Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie and Kelly Osbourne. MySpace aided in Star’s rising popularity as he posted photographs of himself on his profile, which garnered much attention. Star now boasts over 617,000 friends on MySpace.
Because of his self-promotion, wild attitude and appearance, Jeffree opened for Cyndi Lauper on her summer tour and will be starring in his own self-titled reality show, produced by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbatos’ World of Wonders Productions.
Unexpected celebrities
Sometimes Internet celebrities don’t go out of their way to become famous, at least not at first. Other people can upload videos or photos of you and one day you’ll wake up and realize everyone knows who you are and you have no control over it.
In November 2002, 14-year-old Ghyslain Raza videotaped himself battling the force with a golf ball retriever. The video, produced in the studio of his high school in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, was left behind. His friend, doing what any 14-year-old boy would do, uploaded the video to Kazaa and soon millions of people had seen the video. Since then, Raza has been immortalized as the Star Wars Kid.
Raza endured mockery so terrible from both people online and offline that he dropped out of school and was admitted to a children’s psychiatric ward to finish his courses. Lawsuits were thrown around to the tune of $351,000, Raza eventually receiving an undisclosed amount in an out-of-court settlement.
 On the lighter side is Leeroy Jenkins, a character played by Ben Schulz in the popular PC game World of Warcraft. While Schulz’s guild was busy planning a raid, he was off reheating chicken. Upon returning from the microwave, Schulz burst into the next room in the game without his guild mates, shouting his battle cry, “Leeroy Jenkins!” This left his guild scrambling to recover from their botched raid. “At least I have chicken,” he retorted to his guild mates’ complaints. A video of the absurd event hit YouTube, making Leeroy Jenkins a household name in WoW circles. Schulz’s character was incorporated into the WoW card game and he was even the subject of an answer on Jeopardy.
Age is not an issue in the Internet celebrity world. Cory Kennedy, now 17, was only 15 when L.A. nightlife photographer Mark Hunter (a.k.a. Cobra Snake) snapped her picture at a Blood Brother’s concert. Kennedy ended up as an intern for Hunter shortly after that photo was taken. Hunter, then 21, began dating the girl and posting more and more photos of her on his web site.
Kennedy’s attire set trends for young people, even getting the attention of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan. High-profile nightclubs were paying the then 16-year-old Kennedy to show up with her friends just to be seen. Since her mother’s discovery of her e-famous life, Kennedy has been residing in a school for students with types of learning, emotional and behavioural problems.
Kennedy supplemented her online presence by creating a MySpace account, attracting almost 10,000 friends. Cory is now playing the role of Erica Pike on the Lonelygirl15 spin-off, “Acrowleyorder.”
Signs you may already be an Internet celebrity
You may already be an Internet celebrity if you are suffering from the following symptoms: loss of dignity, provocative photos on your MySpace, collecting 10,000 “friends” on MySpace, and an uncontrollable compulsion to upload everything you do to YouTube.
Since, in theory, it is so easy to become an Internet celebrity, the web is now saturated with a multitude of mediocre profiles and desperate attempts for attention. By simply logging into your MySpace account, you’re accosted with a dozen band requests from artists all trying to become the next Arctic Monkeys—a band who rose to fame thanks to MySpace.
Remember when the dot-com bubble burst in 2001? The new dot-com business model did away with the standard ways of running a company, focusing their energies instead on increasing their market share while ignoring everything else. Dot-com companies wanted to get big fast without any regard to what it would take. Sound familiar?
We’re now seeing the same thing with the wannabe e-famous people. Could a celebrity crash be far behind?
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