There go the internet’s shooting stars

Bloggers are helping themselves to a taste of fame.

When the paparazzi stand perched outside the celebrity-infested LA restaurant The Ivy, the starlets feign nonchalance. When Cybele Malinowski shoots Sydney’s music and art aficionados out on the town, they download the images from the web and repost them on their MySpace profiles.

Malinowski, 25, makes her peers feel like rock stars, with glamorously lit portraits that look like they’ve been lifted from the pages of a magazine. As a professional photographer, she’s well equipped to do so, but if she wasn’t taking the photos chances are they’d be doing it themselves.

In bedrooms, train stations and club bathrooms around the country, people are playing paparazzi, snapping and deleting image after image of themselves and their friends in the hope of finding the perfectly angled shot to post online. The reason? They want people to notice them.

For all the attention heaped on political bloggers, much of the blogosphere, social networking sites such as MySpace and publishing platforms are made up of ordinary people documenting their lives – and putting themselves at centre stage. And it’s more common than you’d think.

“There’s this whole global community where everyone’s focused on themselves,” says Malinowski, who maintains multiple blogs but puts most of her efforts into MySpace and the photo sharing site Flickr. “In a way, it’s an egotistical thing. The more people want me, the more I want to give. I’m feeding them and they’re feeding me.”

The distance and anonymity of the web makes it the perfect platform to make such an exchange. And for Malinowski, whose online activities are linked closely to her work, the line is clear: “I show as much as I want my mother to see. Anything more I keep private.”

It’s sensible advice. In the US, political staffer Jessica Cutler was famously fired in 2004 when her blog, which detailed her affairs with older men on Capitol Hill, came to public attention. Now she’s being sued for defamation.

But online notoriety isn’t without its professional perks. Cutler’s blog was quickly adapted into a fiction novel, The Washingtonienne. Malinowski says she’s gotten work with bands through her MySpace, and dedicates a couple of hours each day to the site.

Harley Dennett, 26, scored a job as a journalist with the Sydney Star Observer through his blog. A glimpse into the characters of Sydney’s gay scene, Dennett’s Gayety.net attracts around 3000 hits a day.

He says what he writes is shaped by who’s reading. “It started off as just an experiment in writing. Then people started reading it and suddenly you have an audience and you have to try to manage that audience. And you get addicted to it and write what they want, which encourages you to write well, I suppose,” he says.

What they wanted was reflections of themselves and the people around them, to be a star on somebody else’s personal stage. “When I was writing more about my personal life, which I don’t do quite as much now, I would write about going out, the kinds of things we’d get up to, locations, specific people that we’d run into,” Dennett says.

“And I found that people would either get upset because they weren’t mentioned, or they’d go along because they thought, ‘That’s where the people that I read about go.’”

Dennett attributes Gayety’s success to its relevance to a specific community. “The vast majority of bloggers are only relevant to their local scene,” he says. So while 50 per cent of his traffic comes from the US, “I only really write for Sydney.”

Readers might log on to someone’s profile to find out more about them, appearances don’t always reflect reality, especially when you’re dealing with physical appearance.

“If you look on Flickr, some of the most popular people are hot young women who are very savvy with Photoshop,” says Malinowski. “You can see the transformation of the person, from the first photo they uploaded when they started using Photoshop, to this airbrushed, oversaturated, high contrast creature that’s not quite human.”

But being able to capture the kind of glamour that only comes from rolls of film, good lighting and airbrushing is part of the appeal. “There used to be only a handful of people who would have photos like that. Now everyone can,” she says.

But lest you think it’s all ego and facade, Dennett points out that most people online are relatively genuine in the way they present themselves and in their interactions. “I think that people genuinely want to meet more people, and that’s why they put themselves out there. They want people to know them and they want to know other people. There’s genuine intent behind it - I don’t think they’re just doing it because it’s the cool thing to do.”

- Rachel Hills

Sydney Morning Herald, February 3 2007