New Media Celebrity

If you're not familiar with what "Overly Attached Girlfriend" is, here's the Cliff Notes. The girl's name is Laina Walker and she parlayed her viral success into her own little YouTube channel, whatever that means.

I was watching this one video that shows her and some friends going to an amusement park: there's a section where she starts signing autographs for a group of young girls who seem excited to meet her in person — just as if she were a "regular" celebrity! At one point, the guy shooting the footage says to the girls, "You're all going to be on YouTube, by the way." They suddenly get excited by this prospect. One girl exclaims, "I wanna be on YouTube!" A few of them wave. All, seemingly, without irony.

Okay. It's fucking YouTube. EVERYONE can be on YouTube. Almost everyone IS on YouTube. I feel like the advancement of technology over the past two decades has prematurely turned anyone over 30 into a doddering, Andy Rooney archetype. That said, it was a lot harder to get your face on television back in the day. And now, almost anyone can be an overnight internet sensation. How that can ultimately be monetized and built upon is the bigger uncertainty.