Tech & Pop Culture: When Two Worlds Collide
When tech and pop culture collide, it’s like something out of a teenage rom-com.
Do you remember high school, and all the different “cliques” of the lunch room? Mark Waters’ 2004 movie Mean Girls certainly gave youngsters around the world a glimpse into this environment. His lunch room is divided by table, with each table representing a different stereotypical subset of high school students. From AV jocks to preps, the different cliques are explained, finishing with the apex in high school popularity food chain: the Plastics.
The Plastics are the untouchable social elite, about as far away from anything that had the slightest whiff of geek, nerd, or anything of similar ilk. Despite being so far apart, however, when applying a bit of logic one could surmise that the Plastics would have to at some point cross paths with an academically gifted yet socially inept member of another table – the lunch room is a busy place, after all.
The same is true about celebrities and the tech world. Far be it from me to label all celebrities as the metaphoric Plastics of society and all techies the geeks or nerds – indeed, we’ve seen these worlds merge more and more as the digital age progresses – but one must admit the dichotomy between Hollywood glitz and glam and the genius-powered world of modern technology bears a resemblance to that of the high school lunch room in Mean Girls.
With the advent of the digital age in which we currently find ourselves, the space between celebrity and tech grows smaller every day. Let’s take a look at the metaphorical lunch room run-ins between pop culture and the tech world, and more specifically at celebs and domain names.
Taylor Swift has a digital defense strategy to rival any technophile. Swift represents the side of the spectrum that has her digi-ducks all in a row, perhaps due to her being a millennial and understanding the importance of self-representation online. When the list of new gTLDs was released, Swift was – well, swift – in taking a proactive stance to avoid any potential misrepresentation of her brand. Her team swooped in at the earliest possible moment and purchased TaylorSwift.porn and TaylorSwift.adult. By doing this, she prevented any nefarious individuals from buying these domains and sullying her squeaky-clean image. Nice moves, Swifty!
We’ve written before about the dangers of domain squatting, or purchasing domains with the intention of holding them hostage until a ransom is paid (although domain squatters might choose to refer to the practice as “domain name investing”). Unfortunately, unlike Swift, many celebrities have fallen victim to domain squatting. While a few celebrities have won court cases against domain squatters when their public image was unrealistically portrayed, others have not been so lucky. Many celebrities have shelled out big bucks in order to buy their .com domain from domain squatters; others choose to give the internet the silent treatment and not attempt to own their own domains at all, including the likes of Johnny Depp, Daniel Radcliffe, George Clooney, and One Direction.
What’s the big picture takeaway in all this? What can a lunch room popularity caste system teach us? In short, you need to digitally protect yourself. Creating a strong domain name strategy is essential in today’s kilobyte-eat-kilobyte world to ensure you don’t end up like the countless domain squatting victims the world over, both Hollywood residents and normal folk alike. Here at WestHost, we offer you the ability to put your stamp on your .com, as well as a huge variety of other gTLDs, and even build a glitzy and glamorous website with our website builder tool that will rival the likes of any Brangelina or Kimye.
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