In 2008 a young man named Rex Sorgatz moved from Seattle to New York City to seek his fortune in the New York tech business. “That was a weird time,” he later reflected, for “media and tech were clashing for the first time.” Perhaps not exactly sure what line of work he’d end up in, he printed a business card that listed everything he could do. “Rex Sorgatz,” it read, “creative technologist, strategist, entrepreneur, writer, designer, advisor, consultant.” Being recently from the West Coast, he was slightly ahead of the New Yorkers in some ways. He remembers telling people to try Twitter, but “they would just laugh, laugh, laugh at me.”1
With an odd manner, spiky hair, and a good sense of humor, Sorgatz turned out to be a pretty good fit in the New York scene, proving particularly popular with the ladies. But not long after his arrival, he noticed something weird about New York web entrepreneurs, bloggers, and associated hangers-on: most of them were trying to become famous. Well, not traditionally famous, in the manner of a Hollywood celebrity or the Queen of England. They were studiously seeking something else, which Sorgatz called “microfame” and others called “Internet famous.” Through their blogs, start-ups, cultivation of journalists, and endless rounds of parties, New York’s tech people pursued this goal with a kind of grim determination. In this, the scene was just different from the one back West, where glory belonged solely to those who wrote the best algorithm. There, people wanted to be rich. Here, everyone wanted to be Internet famous.
“When we say ‘microfamous,’ our inclination is to imagine a smaller form of celebrity, a lower life-form striving to become a mammal—the macrofamous or suprafamous, perhaps,” Sorgatz wrote with his accustomed wit. “But microfame is its own distinct species of celebrity, one in which both the subject and the ‘fans’ participate directly in the celebrity’s creation. Microfame extends beyond a creator’s body of work to include a community that leaves comments, publishes reaction videos, sends e-mails, and builds Internet reputations with links.”
That definition appeared in his 2008 article for New York magazine entitled “The Microfame Game,” which was ostensibly a guide to becoming microfamous. As Sorgatz explained, “Microfame is practically a science. It is attainable like running a marathon or acing the LSAT. All you need is a road map.” He recommended, among other things, “oversharing,” “self-publishing,” and one tip that Sorgatz may himself have followed: “separat[ing] yourself from the cacophony by being a little weird. Scratch that—really weird.”2
Meanwhile, Sorgatz himself says that he was most certainly not seeking microfame (“Oh dear God no.”). Yet having become the apparent expert on the subject, he did gain a measure of it. As he recounts, “When social media started to embed itself into people’s lives, I somehow appeared sage, so people associated it with me—for better and worse.” He had his blog readers, his Twitter followers, consulting deals aplenty, and profiles in the New York Observer and New York Times (the latter calling him a “Social Networking Butterfly”). In retrospect, he writes, “I definitely got caught up in some of the personal drama of that era, but the only thing I ever ‘wanted’ was to hang out with people who had unique ideas about the world.”
The oxymoron “microfame” is among those terms from the early 2000s, which include “blogging,” “hashtag,” and “selfie,” that would have made absolutely no sense to people from the last century. There was, once upon a time, a relatively clear line distinguishing the famous from normal people. Crossovers were extremely rare, like the rise of a star, or ephemeral, as in the case of Charles Van Doren or participants of the 1950s and 1960s show Queen for a Day. As People’s editor defined it, to be “famous,” and therefore worthy of a cover, meant having a face known to 80 percent of the public. Hence, Princess Diana was famous; Robert Redford was famous; but tech entrepreneurs, video bloggers, and those who took daily pictures of themselves were not, even if a surprising number of people recognized them.
Even the ancien régime did recognize gradations, however, and these found expression in the Ulmer Scale, created in the 1980s by a reporter named James Ulmer; he named it after himself, perhaps in his own small bid at microimmortality. The scale was designed to measure the celebrity status of actors, for the express purpose of estimating their “bankability” (i.e., how much value they added to a production just by appearing in it). In practice the scale divided famous actors into an A-list, B-list, and C-list, not unlike a bond-rating service on Wall Street. Ulmer called it a movie star “racing form.”3
In the early 2000s, the D-list entered common parlance as a loose category meant to cover a new kind of figure who was somehow famous but not in a way understood by existing metrics. As Gareth Palmer writes, those on the D-list occupied the “space between the unknown mass of ordinary people and the celebrity.”4 The D-listers had no bankability; their achievement, instead, was, as one writer put it, having “triumphed over obscurity.”5 The archetype was, of course, the reality television star, though it could include others like models, romantic partners of celebrities, or faded pop stars. To be D-listed was not necessarily flattering, for it seemed also to refer to those who didn’t know their place; whose efforts to become or remain famous were embarrassing and therefore worthy of broadcast for general amusement. Nonetheless, the very establishment of a D-list undeniably suggested that the line between famous and not was beginning to blur.
But as information technology grew more sophisticated, the D-list began to seem far too crude a measure; new tools, like powerful telescopes, could recognize faint glimmers of fame previously invisible. By the early 2000s, a Google search of someone’s name represented a significant metric of fame. Consider, say, Fred Savage, a former child star, with his 494,000 hits, versus Scarlett Johansson, actress, at 18.2 million, or the highly bankable George Clooney, 29.7 million.
But it was Twitter that would provide the first finely calibrated measurement of microfame, nanofame, and smaller trace levels. Not that this had been its founding vision exactly. Instead, its four quarreling founders, Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass, had repackaged a fairly mundane idea, AOL’s “status update,” and made it easy to broadcast on the web. The first tweets were true status updates, nuggets of TMI, like “I am eating eggs for breakfast.” If it had launched later, Twitter might still be announcing breakfasts. But fortunately it arrived just when the enthusiasm for full-form blogging was beginning to wane, even though the taste for public self-expression persisted. Tweeting thus evolved to become blogging lite, a far less taxing form. With Twitter, one could post interesting links, thoughts, denouncements, cheers, and so on, just as on a blog, but with the 140-character limit it was never as much bother. At the time, much was made of the character limit as a quasi-poetical form. But in truth it was just easier. Where blogging demanded something close to professional dedication, on Twitter a sentence a day was good enough to keep a following engaged, and the famous could rely on a staffer to craft that sentence anyhow.
If there was an ingenious innovation, it was Twitter’s system of “followers”—anyone could “follow” anyone else and thereby receive their tweets, or posts, automatically. Unlike blogs, one did not need to go looking for new tweets; they just arrived. And by indicating interest, even though roughly, the follower system became the new measure of fame. Those of established celebrity amassed millions of followers, like the singer Katy Perry (83.2 million followers) or President Barack Obama (70.3 million). But Twitter was sufficiently sensitive to detect and indicate the smallest quantities. Rex Sorgatz, new in town, had his 10,000 followers. A fairly obscure tech founder whose companies never quite took off nonetheless had 80,000 Twitter followers and therefore a measure of fame within his world. And it might turn out that a given blogger was read widely enough to have roughly three times the followers of Fred Savage. But following was not genetically determined or written in stone. With ably managed utterances, one could grow one’s following, and with it one’s general sense of influence and currency in the new sector of the attention economy. Everyone felt compelled to tweet, and everyone thus submitted to being weighed in the balance: microlevels of fame could now be ascribed to print journalists, some scientists and professors, cable television pundits, minor politicians, outspoken venture capitalists—essentially anyone willing to shoot their mouth off to their micropublic. In this way, figures could remain unknown to 99 percent, 99.9 percent, or even 99.99 percent of the population and nonetheless be “famous” in the highly granular sense. Twitter thus sparked microfame, measured it, and threw fuel on the fire.
Of course, by the numbers, even the achievement of microfame was a rarity. But perhaps the odds were beside the point. As Mark Zuckerberg said of Facebook users, “They’re also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a sense is their brand.” Indeed, with Facebook and Twitter, everyone could now have a brand, and derive a little of the excitement and attention that went with traditional celebrity—perhaps even find a way to resell a bit of that attention. It portended a future a bit different than Andy Warhol had predicted, for in this future “everyone will be famous to fifteen people,” as the technologist David Weinberger quipped.6 Nonetheless, as Rex Sorgatz argued, “It feels like a step toward equality. You can become Facebook friends with the microfamous; you can start IM sessions with them. You can love them and hate them at much closer proximity.” And so just as American democracy promised that any child could grow up to become president, and American capitalism promised that through hard work anyone could become rich, the attention economy threw up its own mirage for the discontented masses: fame for everyone.
That was the utopian version. In actuality, fame, or the hunger for it, would become something of a pandemic, swallowing up more and more people and leaving them with the scars of chronic attention-whoredom. Ironically, though few of the traditional rewards of fame were forthcoming, more of the costs were. And that was in the relative age of innocence: the dominion of Twitter and Facebook alone, when they were tethered to the home. A still rougher beast was slouching toward the Bay Area waiting to be born. But before its coming, when social networks could take their present form, something else had to happen, something even more momentous in the history of attention capture—the arrival of a new and ultimate gathering point for all our longings as well as commerce’s designs upon them: the fourth screen.