Celebrity use to be an elite group but these days anyone can be one with the right buzz at a key club or webpage. That's both cool and a really big problem. It's cool because celebrity is no longer at the control of star makers but a problem in that the pitfalls of celebrity effect people who can't deal with it.
The defenition for celebrity itself are broader than ever. For example a popular blog can have a readers as devoted to it as any band or movie star. Great if you want the attention but a danger when you get the wrong kind of reader...in come the stalkers.
A few models here are well aware of the problem and all have a story or two but what happens when these stalkers get bolder and more intense? An A-List celeb can get the protection they need...a lowly soul with a weblog...not so much. Some go so far as to steal the identities of those they are fixated on while others do the typical "shadowing". This can consist of following them around town to keeping tabs on them online.
It's the online part that gets creepy...with the right accounts in the right places you can be 10 diffrent people to the person a stalker is after. In this age of multi-tasking a stalker can have more than one victim across multiple online communties.
So who or what can stop them? Laws on the books are ineffective and how do you chase or stop a person online? How can a person trust that closeness one develops online when the potential for that being exploited maliciously is so high? Before the biggest danger was hackers and script kiddies...now it's everything from sexual predators to assorted stalkers. Does a community have to police itself to some level? do online celebrities or really really popular souls need to be careful how and who they talk to? or is it all about common sense?
The fun of the net is that people can interact in ways they normally can't or won't in the flesh...I would hate to see that slowly killed off by people who want to exploit this interaction for their own vile aims.
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