The Internet and celebrities go together like Ga Ga and glamour. From its beginnings, the Internet has played a key role in making and breaking countless famous names, from politicians to movie stars to sports figures. Not only does the Web complement the role of existing media, it has taken on a life of its own in creating and destroying celebrity. Ever hear of the Chocolate Rain guy? Think you would have heard of him without the Internet?
But the influence flows in both directions. The things celebrities do and the ways they behave online can alter the shape of the Internet itself. Here are five celebrities who have impacted the Internet in a big way.
Lindsay Lohan
From the earliest email, there has always been gossip online. But Lohan helped turn the noise up to a steady scream. Lohan’s career has waned since the high point of her party years, but together with her cohorts, Hilton and Winehouse and Britney Spears, Lohan set the standard for fast youth in the online age. In the process, she lit the fire under a new industry of gossip sites such as TMZ.com, which parlayed its Internet success into a TV show. Lohan’s impact on the Web may not turn out to be a good thing for her professionally, but it has only helped a booming Internet gossip business.
Lady Ga Ga
Twitter has created one of the strangest intersections on the Internet, a junction where celebrities not only tweet the details of their daily lives for millions of regular folks to read, but occasionally read what the regular folks are tweeting about them. It creates a unique (if false) sense of connection that didn’t exist before social media came along. What celebrities say on Twitter reaches a lot of people, and the more followers, the greater the reach. With nearly 15 million followers, Lady Ga Ga stands as the leading tweeter of them all.
Ashton Kutcher
Kutcher can’t beat Ga Ga when it comes to fans on Twitter; he has only 8 million followers. But he did at least as much as she has to popularize the social media service. Back in 2009, Kutcher beat out CNN in a race to become the first presence on Twitter to acquire 1 million followers. The contest was used to raise $100,000 for charity.
Steve Jobs
Without the computer and software innovation of mega developers such as Jobs and Bill Gates, there would be no thriving computer infrastructure on which we could use the Internet. But Jobs’ Apple went further, helping to revolutionize the way we live online. The iPod, for example, joined with the early-00s boom in online file sharing to radically change the way people buy and use music, permanently moving the focus from brick and mortar record stores to the Internet. The iPhone and iPad have furthered the melding of Web and hardware.
Mahir Cagri
You don’t recognize his name, but if you were on the Internet in the late 90s, you probably came across him. He may be the first true Internet celebrity, made famous by his online presence alone. Back in 1999, Cagri, a teacher from Turkey, published a low-rent Web page with a few pictures and a little bit of information about himself, including his love of the ladies, all written in exceedingly halting English. The come-ons, the photos of a heavily mustachioed Cagri, and the no-frills page design made for a perfect mess of hilarity, and it spread like fire. Cagri is not among the better-remembered Internet phenomena, and he is certainly not a celebrity in the traditional sense. But he may have been the first viral Internet celebrity, he paved the way for a type of notoriety that has since raised a handful of people to genuine celebrity status and has permanently changed the way we look at the Internet.
Frank Anderson is a social media and marketing writer who also works with dedicated web hosting technologies.
