CELEBRITY & TECHNOLOGY
One ought to pay attention to the vehicle of the metaphor “going viral”, for this is contagion, infection, and plague, and yet, entranced by media, people lust after it.
Celebrity is as old as history and probably older, but tools change it, the pen for example. Caesar’s pen in writing the Gallic Wars was as devastating in Rome as was his sword against Gallic and Germanic tribes, which is said to have been his intention in wielding the sword: to write his book, and thus to gain absolute power in Rome.
Later, we have the intervention of technology: the printing of Martin Luther’s 95 theses was more telling than the theses themselves. Later the printing of his translation of the Bible into German would cement what they did. But a third or more of the people of Europe died in the appalling ensuing conflict, and to this day the very word ‘religion’ has a sour taste to Europeans. The societal division that came about and which has persisted to this day and indeed worsened was even more serious than that slaughter.
Today, the technology (it is not a tool) itself dictates. The naive think that they use it, but it uses them, without any anthropomorphism. Someone imagines that they themselves have become famous – the young man or woman writing songs about the world, and love and pain; the stand-up comedian satirising the political class; the demagogic figure seeking what he imagines to be power – but the technology itself makes use of them, and destroys them or discards them when it no longer needs them. In the interim they live in the spotlight, and people become obsessed with them, sometimes homicidally so, and think that they know them personally.
The success of “going viral” is something to be avoided like the plague it is. Natural growth is slower and less dramatic. Cancerous growth shares something with usury: it is exponential.