Sunday, May 23, 2010

The tipping point

There had to be a point at which it was easier to be a fan. I was reflecting on this as I was YouTubing the other night. You know what we had back in the old days? Fan newsletters advertising VHS swaps!

The internet definitely made things easier, but its very ease made the proliferation of too many sites with too many things inevitable. I remember seeing a magazine cover with Ryan Phillippe, dubbed "The Face that Launched a Thousand Websites." There was a point, though, when people of any note were making a real effort to have an official website.

They still are. They're also secretly writing on wikipedia pages. There's also myspace (which the early adopters have hung onto, alas), facebook, and twitter. It's just one or three too many for me. I start gritting my teeth and wondering how much I like this person. Smart adopters have linked them, of course, as with baritone Thomas Hampson (just joined his fb and twitter feed, hence this post). I actually did some linking myself for the animal shelter I fostered for, hooking their blogspot and twitter into facebook, but I hit a point when I was linking everything back on everything else and I was wondering if I was going to create an infinite feedback loop so that one fatal tweet would make everything explode...

And last but not least, youtube, which has everything... of varying quality, but avert your eyes from the comments. (This is something you learn quickly when you are a Queen fan. Freddie Mercury provokes some of the most hilarious comments, but also many of the most homophobic ones.) If your celeb of choice has an official channel, great, but there's no chance it'll have everything you want.

Oh well. Search engines we have always with us.

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