Ya gotta be careful these days.  For quite some time, people have taken interesting pictures and movies of people doing unusual things, but in times past such things would be lucky to do more than entertain those taking the pictures.  If it was caught on a security camera, local authorities might take an interest if there was a crime involved, but that would be the most attention it got.

Not so anymore.  Such imagery can now go “viral” on the internet, turning people into instant stars for better or for worse.  In the past few days alone there’s an astounding video of a car getting airborne and disintegrating when it hits a bridge pillar and another of a woman putting a cat in a garbage bin.  The backstory on the first one is nothing terribly strange–a naughty young man is caught with evidence of drugs and a young girl, but is released.  He goes speeding past a police car (which had a dashboard camera) and crashed.  The crash is spectacular, and amazingly the young man survived, although he’s in critical condition.  More amazing is that you and I even know about it.  Not because it made the evening news–although I believe it did in many places–but because it was (at the very least) linked on Facebook and posted on YouTube.

The woman who dumped the cat is in trouble.  Not a great deal of legal trouble–it’s not against the law to put a cat in a trash can–but thanks to the internet lots of people know who she is and she is getting badly harassed.  I am certain she hates the cat even more than she did when she dumped it.  Again, the more amazing bit is that you and I and lots of other people know about it.  Her act of cruelty would at most have made the evening news ten years ago, perhaps drawing some local interest, but few would have known who she is.  Now she’s under police protection.

These two examples are just the most recent bits of internet stardom.  The Star Wars Kid, the Numa Numa Guy, the Dramatic Chipmunk / Prairie Dog (technically the latter) are just a few of the internet memes which have entered our world over the last few years.  Where were these people ten years ago?  Twenty?  A century?  They were out there, doing their thing, but not gaining any attention.  People, both young and old, have mimicked scenes from movies the way the Star Wars Kid did for decades or lip synched like the Numa Numa guy.  Plenty of animals act in interesting ways, with or without a camera to catch them.  But with the internet and sites like YouTube, ordinary things like these can catch the public’s attention and make stars out of their subjects.

Why does this happen?  Some are easy to understand–the car crash is spectacular–but a five-second clip of a prairie dog turning and looking at the camera?  The video has gotten, to date, over twenty-two million views.  Twenty-two million.  I can almost understand some of these a little bit.  It’s easy to see ourselves doing things like the Star Wars Kid or the Numa Numa guy, or perhaps we know somebody like the woman who dumped the cat.  We can relate to these things.  But the chipmunk prairie dog doesn’t have anything in it we can relate to.  It is the proof that anybody and anything can be a viral internet star.

Anyway, I have now figured out how to be a star.  I don’t have a car to crash and wouldn’t want to do that if I did, so I’ll have to do something else.  I’ll hold a cat in my left hand and a light saber in my right hand.  I’ll wave the light saber around while I run into a concrete pillar while lip-synching a song.  Then I’ll turn around and give the camera a dramatic look.  Yeah, I’ll be a star.  See you on YouTube.