It has been a wild week for Singapore, in terms of viral news stories on social media platforms. There was news about taxi fare hikes, MRT breakdowns, radio personalities being censured for ridiculous reasons, and teenagers making a fool of themselves in their video rants. To top it off, there was even a pair of young teens dry humping each other in public.
The last two got me thinking - what does it take to get famous nowadays? The answer seems pretty simple - get caught on social media doing something stupid.
If you look at certain other 'famous' people like S L (have to be abbreviated to prevent this from being picked up by him (the narcissistic fool searches for his own name) ) and Dee Kosh (publicly humiliated by XX), they also shot to fame (or infamy) by doing something stupid and posting it on Youtube. The former is also known to be self-obsessed and extremely narcissistic on his own Twitter account.
Therefore, if you want to be famous, there's no need to take part in Singapore Idol or get interviewed by a Mediacorp reporter about the MRT breakdowns. All you have to do is
- Do something stupid
- Get captured on video/photos
- Upload on social media
- Spread it abit
- Wait
- Cash in
1) Do something stupid
'Stupid' is actually a replaceable term here. You can try 'moronic', 'nonsensical', 'ludicrous' or 'senseless'. They may in fact all be synonyms and fall under the same group in a Thesaurus. (In fact, they do)
Think of something that is beyond your wildest imagination (but avoid taboo issues like race, religion and terrorism unless your wish is to be arrested) in terms of stupidity. Imagine there's a scale of stupidity from 1 to Steven Lim (Oh shit, now he's going to pick it up), think of something BEYOND Steven Lim.
For those of you having problems, you can try a mindmap method. Just think of a starting word, the first word to come to your mind, and elaborate on it. Make it as stupid as possible. Then go further. Let me give you an example.
Cat. Cats purr. Purr like a cat? No not stupid enough. Meowing. Meowing really loudly. Meowing at the top of your voice on top of a table in the middle of a coffeeshop. No not stupid enough. Meowing at the top of your voice, alternating between falsetto and a baritone, while crawling around on all fours, in the middle of town.
Get the picture?
2) Get captured on video/photos
Talking about pictures, you will never get famous even if your act is hilariously stupidly dumb if noone is actually around to take a picture or film it. To be safe, get a friend to film you. Maybe get two friends, as one may run off to hide his face to avoid being associated with you.
This step may be entirely unnecessary, if what you're doing is something like boasting to the world How You Slapped Your Mother or criticizing Kpop, because when you do those, you instantly jump to Step 6.
3) Upload on social media
Twitter or Facebook are your routes to success. However, you need to turn off your stupid switch and not do something like upload the video on your private account and expect it to spread like wildfire.
Also, if you have a grand total of 17 followers, don't expect it to spread to the whole world (unless your 17 followers include someone with 129837 followers)
@mention it to someone relatively more... connected than you, and hope that it's stupidly ridiculous enough to warrant a retweet, a like, or a repost. If it is, it will spread. Things spread on Twitter and Facebook. Besides STDs. For now.
4) Spread it abit
We already said this in the previous sentence. Oops.
5) Wait
This is really a redundant step, as you can actually invest your time better on step 4. Post it on everyone's wall or something (Though this may lose you many 'friends'. 'Friends' is in inverted commas because we all know noone really knows more than 80% of your Facebook friends anyway)
And now, depending on whether your act is outrageous enough to warrant a public uproar (most likely it is, because it is human nature to hop on the moral high horse and criticize), the next step follows:
6) Cash In
Fame may not be what you expect. You may be expecting the murmured whispers when you walk past people in public accompanied with not-so-subtle pointing. You may be expecting people to come up to you and ask for a photograph. you may be expecting newfound street cred among your gang of orangehaired monkeys.
However, you may be greeted with rude taunting, spam on your Facebook wall, and mass ostracism. Perhaps even a blanket party some time down the line if you haven't been through National Service.
Whatever it is, be prepared for the backlash. Be prepared that everything may turn out differently from what you expect. Maybe people will issue you death threats as they're now jealous of you. Maybe a parody Twitter account of you may sprout up. Who knows.
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I hope this guide has been helpful in your quest for fame. Now if you will excuse me, I have to stop typing from my smartphone and get ready as my train is arriving in 2 minutes. Oh wait, I better not announce that, as SMRT has not made their official statement yet.
