Part of the attraction of online media is the way it reflects. There are few things as cool as finding out that someone has responded to your post or that someone has followed your feed. For many, the feeling is intoxicating.

Microcelebrity is the phenomenon of being extremely well known not to millions but to a small group — a thousand people, or maybe only a few dozen. As DIY media reach ever deeper into our lives, it’s happening to more and more of us. Got a Facebook account? A whackload of pictures on Flickr? Odds are there are complete strangers who know about you — and maybe even talk about you. …..

If you really want to see the future, check out teenagers and twentysomethings. When they go to a party, they make sure they’re dressed for their close-up — because there will be photos, and those photos will end up online. In managing their Web presence, they understand the impact of logos, images, and fonts. And they’re increasingly careful to use pseudonyms or private accounts /content/view/31/”>cialis effectiveness when they want to wall off the more intimate details of their lives. (Indeed, fully two-thirds of teenagers’ MySpace accounts are private and can be viewed by invitation only.) (Wired 15.12)

Recently, someone sent me a note with a link to a picture of my back at a party. He said, “You should trademark the ponytail.” Along with everyone else I know, I have had to become good at choosing my photos and managing an online persona.

Microcelebrity affects different people in different ways.

• Some people are really scared by it. One of the reasons people don’t participate in online community is a phobia about the spotlight. It’s related to the fact that the most frightening thing that most people can imagine is public speaking (glossophobia)
• Some people enjoy micoscopic increments of public attention so much that they blather on and on and disrupt conversation. For them, it’s better to have a ton of negative attention than none at all.
• Some people develop a craving for it. They get a little and want more. They do weird stuff to try to prove that they are micro-famous. You see them posting the same material all over the place. Every teensy increment of attention helps to satisfy the hunger.
• Some people are empowered by it. They become more confident and more daring. For these folks, microcelebrity creates a burst of personal innovation.
• Some people try to manage and grow it. This is the “Brand-Me” crowd. They work hard to shape and transmit information about themselves. There seems to be an inverse relationship between brand value and the energy invested to maintain it.
• Some people get very jealous. One person’s microcelebrity can seem enormous compared to yours (say the difference between 5,000 followers and 500 or the difference between a couple thousand blog readers and your 15.) Jealousy and envy quietly eat away at personal confidence.
• Some people confuse microcelebrity and hard work. A subset of envy, these people feel slighted and misunderstood. This is a teensy little bit like the stuff that rock stars complain about ie, this might look easy but it’s hard work.

I am certain that there are other ways in which microcelebrity drives the behavior we see online. I believe that it effects us all though I think Gen Y is more used to it than Gen X and the Boomers. The younger demographic, more digitally astute, has been using new media as a mirror. The dividing line is those who use their cameras to take self-portraits and those who can’t. It’s in the mid-20s somewhere.

What’s interesting is that it’s not really celebrity at all. It’s a new factor in our lives. We increasingly live under constant 24 hour public scrutiny. It’s the feeling you get when every /content/view/31/”>cialis effectiveness electronics device you encounter contains a camera pointed at you. It’s what it’s like to be online 24×7. It’s what it’s like to have a network of 500 friends, real friends.

The generational differences here are very important. A young person with 1,000 friends doesn’t usually feel more important, just more connected. The microcelebrity phenomenon strikes the older (over 25) demographic. There, a big network is a sign of relative importance. It’s new and disjointed from normal experience. In the younger set, it’s congruent.

We all just woke up and it’s either the Truman Show or a Talking Heads song.

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I’m leading an Intensive workshop called Recruiting Strategy in a Down Economy: Identifying What’s to Come in the Upturn at the Kennedy Recruiting Conference in Las Vegas on May 19.