A british school survey carried out by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers lead to the conclusion that 75% of today’s school children want to become famous sport or pop stars. Boys prefer David Beckham while girls favour Victoria Beckham or Paris Hilton.
The teachers are alarmed, because most of the children will realize that they won’t become the next Beckham or Hilton easily. They will grow up with a feeling of failure or low self-esteem when celebrity status is not achieved.
In my opinion this is not something new at all. Hey, my hero was Captain Kirk 😉
I believe that most of the people nowadays want to become famous in the one or another way too:
being a successful entrepreneur, becoming financially independent (popularly known as “becoming rich”), having a lot of readers on your blog, hundreds of “followers” on Twitter, all these are indicators of the silent wish to be liked, valued and seen by other people.
I think these wishes are natural among all human beings, as long as people don’t suffer from peer community pressure, stress caused by pressure to become “famous”… and that’s where my critique of the “Web 2.0” comes in:
I think the web tools we are currently using (like blogs, Twitter, MySpace or Facebook) can increase exactly this feeling of peer community pressure, because we are permanently following the life of our new “idols” (a blogger, or someone on Twitter or facebook) and then compare and measure ourself with these “idols”.
These new behaviours can easily result in a feeling of failure and low self-esteem. And beware! Some people are really good at “personal marketing” and trying to increase their community status on behalf of your feelings. Be conscious about it. Just think of it the next time you compare the number of people following you (“followers”) and people you follow (“following”) on Twitter.
On this, i wish you a relaxed day, without any peer community pressure! 😉
(text by Chris Car)