The new age of fame ǀ the power of the individuals
The new age of fame ǀ the power of the individuals
TikTok – you’ve probably heard of it by now. If you haven’t then know your children or grandchildren almost certainly have.
In the last few decades social media has evolved rapidly: from myspace to Facebook to Instagram and snapchat, Tiktok appears to be the next phase in that evolution. With 800m active users and a company valuation of over 100 billion dollars, the app by technology behemoth ByteDance is seemingly unstoppable, you wouldn’t be stupid to believe that this rocket ship is bound for the stars.
Therefore, it might be surprising to hear that over the course of just a few days the application went from an average review score of 4.5/5 down to just 1 star in India.
Who on earth has the power to change the course of such a huge company?
That is the question many people were wondering. As it turns out this was all sparked by a feud between two popular Indian creators, a tiktoker and a youtuber. India today explained the situation: the whole situation can be traced back to a quarrel between Youtuber Carry Minati and TikTok influencer Amir Siddiqui. Following verbal attacks by another youtuber, Siddiqui posted a refute, among other things claiming that Youtubers plagiarize content and daring Minati to “roast” him, which he did on the 8th May. That video accumulated millions of views but was taken down on the 14th as supposedly Siddiqui’s fans reported it for cyberbullying. This made Minati’s 18 million subscribers angry enough to go to the play store and bombard the app with one-star reviews.
This raises serious concerns. When do we classify the power of individuals, who have become famous, as to much? Is there a point when they can become to influential?
At the end of the day this situation is relatively minor. Yet I am left to wonder whether one day just such a celebrity might turn their audience against something far worse than an app.
For now at least, this isn’t to much of a concern but, in my opinion, it is quickly becoming one. Now more than ever more and more people are getting their taste of fame. A case study in point would be the esports scene. Worth billions of dollars it is rapidly becoming one of the largest industries in the world.
Fortnite is one of the world’s biggest games, its esports scene gave out over 100 million dollars last year alone, that’s not including all the money the players of this game can get for streaming themselves playing the game live to hundreds of thousands of people, along with producing content for their millions of fans across Youtube and other social media platforms.
These players seem not dissimilar to any other sports star with their huge fanbase and large sponsorship deals.
However, there is one key difference that highlights these competitors from the rest of the esports and sporting scene.
The average age of players, at the Fortnite world cup last year, was just 15 years old.
This amount of power, influence and money to kids so young is a prime example of where things could go wrong.
Wouldn’t you know it – they have.
Over the last few months the cheating scandals have only increased, it seems like a regular occurrence that players are banned for collusion, working with someone they are meant to be competing against so as to gain a competitive advantage over the other 100 players in Fortnite’s battle royale arena.
The simplest way to imagine this is if you look took a fight between 10 people and then two of them decided to not hit each other and team up on everyone else. This seems all well and good, it is just a game after all, until you remember these people, cheating the competition, are winning hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Epic games, the company behind the game Forntite, has been doing their best by giving temporary and occasionally, for more serious offences, permanent bans.
The worrying thing is this doesn’t seem to be stopping people from cheating.
Just a few weeks ago the Young Australian player, nicknamed Kquid, was banned for using a program that helps him aim- imagine an Olympic bow and arrow shooter vs a bow from the Viking era and you get a sense of how much of an advantage this can give. This case is just another one in a string of bans which does not seem to be slowing down.
This seems like a mess but not something we should be to worry about, you might be thinking.
I tended to agree until I realised that the true problem was the fact that their millions of fans were also being influenced and seeing their beloved influences cheating. How is that going to set them up for life?
I don’t think we want a society where people are always looking for ways to “game” the system.
A lot of people are gaining fame fast, its something all of us are going to have to come to terms with, what we can do is consume and share content that has a positive impact on the world, there is plenty of it and therefore I believe we needn’t be too pessimistic.
For now, all we can do is hope others follow our path.
Sources:
https://www.tizenhelp.com/tiktok-youtube-flooded-with-1-star-reviews-in-india/
https://www.bytedance.com/en/products
https://www.indiatoday.in/
https://fortnite-esports.gamepedia.com/Kquid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhXmjyg8luI&t=668s