I'll probably quit doing this too

andrearosen:

ryanbrown:

Regarding this assertion:

People don’t turn to their cameraphone because they’re share-happy egotists, they do it because the actual press has an appetite for what they’re releasing, and, sometimes, will even pay for it.

I’m pretty sure no one is going to pay for this “sighting”, also pretty sure the simple delight in ‘publishing’ something warrants enough justification for the “share-happy” thesis.

First!

Any press validation is incentive enough, even in the case of celebrity sightings. A girl was flipped off by Michelle Trachtenberg a few weeks ago and called Page Six herself to report the incident. Trachtenberg denied it and there were no witnesses, but here’s a citizen “report” that the Post deemed suitable to run.

Sure, it’s definitely incentive enough - but its not the impetus for the phenomenon on a whole, not by a long shot. There’s an undeniable instinct to prove one’s very existence in the act of commiting something to permanence: “If I had an opinion, and no one was around to hear it, did I really have an opinion?” etc etc. I’m sure, in the realm of breaking news and “celebrity journalism”, that mainstream acknowledgment (compensation even!) plays a more significant role, but its not a singular cause… and, in the grand scheme of the vox populi represented via our fun new technologies, it’s an outlier at best.