Overnight Celebrity

 Over 350 million of us have Facebooks. Half of us log in at least once a day. Over 75 million of us Tweet compared to roughly six million a couple months ago. We are currently posting over four billion images on Flickr and viewing videos on YouTube more than two billion times. 

Hannah Minx takes part in all of this and more. Minx is a self-proclaimed vlogger from Philadelphia whose simple, common interest in online social media has garnered her true Internet fame. She is the owner of one of the 30 million YouTube accounts, but, unlike most, her account is a small, unintended business. 

Last spring, Minx spent the semester in Tokyo, but, before her departure, she naturally wanted to do a little background research. She found that there were relatively few online resources other than the vlogs of the YouTubers living in Tokyo. 

"Their culture is really not something they prepare you for in Japanese class," Minx says. "There are some books by people with Ph.D.s that are completely wrong. The stuff that the vloggers are talking about is really like the first documentation of what it's like to be a foreigner living in Japanese society. The best resource is a vlogger who has been living there for six years and can talk about his experience." 

Some weeks later, a jet-lagged Minx was wandering the streets of this foreign city when she noticed that all the bikes were poorly secured. 

"There were just these dinky locks," she says. "You could just walk away with the bikes." 

Bored and restless, she went back to her dorm and made her first video, "Bikes in Tokyo." 

Minx has since posted 59 videos to her channel, which is the fourth most popular in all of Japan. She has 12,073 fans on her Facebook page, 2,080 followers on Twitter and 63,960 subscribers on YouTube. A single video entitled "Guide to Asian Emoticons" has nearly 1,200,000 views. So why the seemingly overnight fame? 

Minx oftentimes asks herself the same question, but if she had to venture a guess, it's because "people on the internet like Asian things and cute girls. Cute girls plus Asian things equals a million views." She assumes that her emoticon videos are the most popular because they are the Asian equivalent of American smiley faces, and her Japanese friends like to post facial expressions which simulate the online symbols such as: ^-^. In fact, early on one of her friends, a Tokyo vlogger, started a "tag game," which is when someone tags a particular video and the creator of that video has to make another video in response to one that the person who tagged him or her has made. For Minx's game, the instructions were to answer the question "What are your favorite emoticons?" then make the real-life face of those emoticons.  The result was 50 new videos, all of which were linked back to Minx's original. 

From there, people also tweeted about Minx's channel, posted fan artwork to her Facebook fan page and, if they subscribed to her account, read the e-mails that were sent every time she posted a new video. With these types of social networking techniques, even if they were not defined as such, it is no surprise that Hannah Minx became a talked-about name. Her hobby expanded as she used this new media to her advantage.