Commentary: Down With Gawker The Gawker Stalker website might sound familiar to you, especially if you follow celebrity comings and goings. The site has become famous for its ability to accurately track celebrities in the Manhattan area, which annoys the heck out of celebrities trying to maintain some degree of anonymity. By mapping where celebrities have been sighted, Gawker Stalker and similar sites also make it easier for the general public (and the occasional obsessed fan) to stalk their favorite celebs. This fact was not lost on famous movie star George Clooney, who took personal offense at his whereabouts being made public via Gawker Stalker. Clooney decided to strike back, and encouraged his friends and colleagues to flood the Gawker Stalker site with false sightings, thus inducing false information overload and burying the real sightings among the bogus. Here's the email that Clooney sent out to various show-business publicists: "There is a simple way to render these guys useless. Flood their Web site with bogus sightings. Get your clients to get 10 friends to text in fake sightings of any number of stars. A couple hundred conflicting sightings and this Web site is worthless. No need to try to create new laws to restrict free speech. Just make them useless. That's the fun of it. And then sit back and enjoy the ride. Thanks, George." Being recognized in public and fawned over by fans is part and parcel of being a successful movie star; if they don't want the fame, they shouldn't take the money. That said, it's easy to sympathize with people who just want a little privacy, and find that privacy being encroached upon by web-fueled celebrity stalkers. Does that make sites like Gawker Stalker a bad thing? I don't knowbut I do know that I wouldn't want my every move tracked on a publicly posted Google map! |