Blog Post 2, Kwok Hoi Yin, SID:20031978

Kwok Hoi Yin  20031978

Blog Post 2

Watkins, S. C. (2009). We Play: The Allure of Social Games, Synthetic Worlds, and Second Lives. The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social-Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future. Boston: Beacon Press.

Everyone can share their daily life in social media platform such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Then what is the different between Katy Perry and me?  Is Katy Perry have 95.1 millions followers and I have 95 followers. Why Katy Perry need to have an Twitter account? Is she really wants to share her life with her followers? I do not doubt that but I think marketing will be a bigger reason. “Through analysis of tweets from 237 highly followed Twitter users, we find that celebrity practice involves presenting a seemingly authentic, intimate image of self while meeting fan expectations and maintaining important relationships.” (Marwick, A. & boyd, d., 2011).  In addition, to admire the idol’s talent, fans also interested in idol’s personal life, so media platform like Twitter is a good channel to let celebrities to shape their image and communicate with fans, is that the truest side of their own? We never know. We do not even know if he/she is using the offical account, that can be the celebrity’s assistant or their manager.

A phenomenon I also think it’s interesting, the boundary between celebrities and ordinary people is gradually blurred.  The reading mentioned about ‘micro-celebrity’, using social media to develop and maintain an audience (Senft, 2008).

PewDiePie, best known for his video games commentaries and vlogs on YouTube. He used to been the most subscribed user on YouTube and Time named him one of “The World’s 100 Most Influential People.” He is not a ‘traditional’ celebrity, he is not an actor or singer, he is just a video game player, but everyone knows him because of YouTube, that shows the powers of social media platform. You don’t even need to have ability, the best example is HowToBasic, also a youtuber, but he does not speak or show his face and remains anonymous. His video just using food to create a large mess by smashing and throwing the aforementioned objects, but he still get 8 million subscribers. Why? I think talented cannot get people attention already, because there are too many people are talented and is easy to find in a network-developed world. If you want to be famous and you don’t have any celebrity friends, you need to break the rules, do something normal people won’t do, need to be an exceptional.

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References

1. HowToBasic. (2017). En.wikipedia.org. Retrieved 6 January 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HowToBasic

2. PewDiePie. (2017). En.wikipedia.org. Retrieved 6 January 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PewDiePie

3. Watkins, S. C. (2009). We Play: The Allure of Social Games, Synthetic Worlds, and Second Lives. The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social-Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future. Boston: Beacon Press.