What does it take to be famous in this day and age? Apart from a smartphone and a dose of narcissism, not much else. The Internet – the original celebrity incubator – has been hatching celebrities nearly as long as people have had bad taste, but it would appear to be getting easier than ever to achieve a level of stardom.
Jeremy Meeks, the handsome criminal whose steely eyed mugshot sparked #FelonCrushFriday (landing him a modelling contract while still in jail) is hardly an exceptional case anymore. Seventeen-year-old Nash Grier (who?) is one of the world’s biggest social media celebrities. Purely by association, his five-year-old half-sister Skylynn Floyd had 1.3 million followers on Vine before she started school. Literally anyone can be famous. The only thing that separates Meeks from the who’s who of young hopefuls is the fact that fame found him.
If as Lord Byron once said, fame is the thirst of youth, then the current crop is parched. Kids have grown up following their heroes on Youtube, Instagram and Twitter and understand that with enough followers what happened to Justin Bieber could happen to them. Their understanding is all it takes is to be online, in some capacity, as much as possible.
