Video Source: youtube.com

I was in Pittsburgh a few weekends ago, and finally made it to the Warhol Museum. Regardless if you like his aesthetics, Warhol’s influence on post-modern culture is unquestionable. Our current ideas of celebrity, selling out, authenticity, urbanism, mass brands, and cultural production (to name a few) can in some way be traced back to Warhol, whose life was as much of his art as the objects his produced. Many say that if he didn’t do what he did, then someone else would have. But someone didn’t and Warhol did, which makes the point moot.

His appearance on the Love Boat with the parents from Happy Days (which I remember seeing in re-run in the 80s) pretty much encapsulates this influence. From just being on the show, to interacting with middle America sit-com icons to proving the mass appeal of his art, the clip shows it all.

Images source: Wired.com

I was sad to just find out that Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons & Dragons died on Tuesday.

I haven’t played D&D in about twenty years, and when I did I was never particularly very good at it. But it was 80s, and video games still had 8 bit graphics, and I was really into creating characters, lead figures, and dice with more than six sides. Eventually video games would get more advanced, and D&D seemed to be passed its peak. As his obit in the The Time Online noted, his influence can be seen in years to come. The early 3-D first-person shooter games that started appearing in the mid-90s, such as Doom (even if it was more sci-fi than fanasty, the player is still running around a subterranean maze of sorts), Myst, and World of Warcraft come to mind. Magic the Gathering seems to be an obvious extension of D&D as well, although not a video game.

I appreciate that fact that Gygax didn’t particularly like video games, and never designed one. As he was quoted in an interview in 2005, that Dungeons & Dragons “offers camaraderie, imagination, socialisation… Computer games can be so isolating. They’re not anything like sitting in a group and laughing, telling stories. You can’t share a bag of Cheetos online.” And even though I’m still not a huge gamer, there are still residues of my D&D days such as a love of graph paper and my DVD box-set of the Dungeon & Dragons animated series voiced by Willie Aames ( Tommy from “Eight is Enough” and Don Most (Ralph Malph from Happy Days.)

D&D seems to continually appear in random places over time. The last episode of Freaks and Geeks, Discos and Dragons, which is amazing and some of the best television ever produced. The opening lines to In the Garage by Weezer, “I’ve got a Dungeon Master’s guide, I’ve got a twelve-sided die,” is brilliant. However Gygax’s influence, as alluded to before, moves beyond that of kitschy, vaguely ironic pop culture references.

More recently, I went to a panel on gaming for the book, The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman. One of the speakers included in the anthology was Gary Alan Fine, a sociologist, now at Northwestern. In the 80s, he did an great ethnographic study of role playing gamers, including ones who played Dungeons & Dragons, which he documented in his still in print book, Shared Fanasty. The book contains knowing insight into the players of these games and their social structures, during that period, and still has relevance today as new (or perhaps not so new) social structures and conventions are being created in today’s MMRPGs.

Players of D&D in the 70s and 80s went on to advance the world in computer science and gaming, which clearly influenced the development of these technologies and environments for better or worse. We are only recently moving beyond these motifs and initial sources of inspiration in our increasing digital and interactive world. However, it is still important to mark the influential role that Gary Gygax played in the development gaming and virtual worlds, even if he lived in relative obscurity to the world at large.

Image source: Amazon.com

I love the idea nanocelebrity or micro-celebrity, where people are famous among a small group, but far from being a household name. Academic conferences are often a great place to find micro-celebrity. In the US, few academic cross over to the mainstream celebrity. Within a field, an academics can become rock stars, who have followers and detractors and can be controversial for their ideas. Their opinions can be widely cited and discussed in formal scholarship as well as on blogs and discussion groups.

At the recent Computational Social Sciences conference I attended and covered here, many of my social network theory rock star heroes  were speaking, including Lada Adamic from the University of Michigan. Adamic has done some important and early work looking into the link structures of the blogosphere.  In 2005, she “famously” looked at political blogs after the 2004 US Presidential Election, showing how most blue and red blog were far more likely to link to similarly minded blogs. Some of her visualizations made their way across the internet increasing her micro-celebrity status. The first time I met her (in the elevator at another conference) I didn’t even realize who she was. In the world of micro-celebrity, one’s ideas can be posted across the blogosphere, and can have the occasional pictureless quote in mainstream publications, adding to their street credibility among their small fan base.

Clive Thompson recently wrote a nice column on the subject and how Facebook status updates are like sending out press releases. He quotes Theresa Senft who is attributed with coming up with the idea micro-celebrity in the digital age, “People are using the same techniques employed on Madison Avenue to manage their personal lives.” In a networked society, information flows more freely and connections are more easily made. Groups of interested parties are form around people, through discussion forums and Yahoo Groups are Thompson sites. However, micro-celebrity can even be sliced into smaller facets.

Facebook allows anyone to be and operative as a micro-celebrity. It’s not uncommon for people who went to college in the Facebook era to have over 500 friends. On the occasional ego-check to see how many “friends” I have, I usually surprised to see how high the number is, because I don’t consider myself a power user. Digital micro-celebrity is replacing what was the traditions of the “small town.” The traditional “small town” with multi-generations living near by, if not the same street or house, fostered micro-celebrity. The only difference is that the micro-celebrities have a distributed network of fans, rather than local ones.  Small groups (of say, less than 1000) can easily form, some of the forces which motivate the formation of these groups are worth looking to into, and will be covered in posts to come.