Every now and again you hear about some random person who does some random thing and for either random or obvious reasons, ends up (typically, briefly) famous. Two prominent examples from this year are the on going Ally Louks saga and Hawk Tuah Girl. To my understanding, Louks achieved viral fame solely from her own posts on Twitter while Hawk Tuah Girl was in someone else's video. I'm sure you can think of many other examples. I can think of others, too, just too vaguely for you to be able to look them up. Wait, Leave Britney Alone. Probably one of the OG examples.
I'm calling this fame culture. Or, rather, I'm calling the fact people know this sort of thing Could Happen To You fame culture.
At this point, there's another concept I want to bring in called "horse famous", which apparently was something that happened to people all the time when Bronys were a Thing. Basically, horse famous is when you end up being really well known in a niche community (in this case, among Bronies). Horse fame, I contend, can be generalised to any kind of community. I'd contend Four Sided Triangles was horse infamous on NSG, for example. Actually, I guess most NSG famous posters are really more NSG infamous but a while back there was Alien Space Bats. Everyone seemed to have heard of him and not a negative word was said.
So, even if you'd have to be deluded to think your next selfie will get you interviewed in the MSM and make sites like Vox write explainers on the theme "who is [] and why is everyone talking about them?", there's always the potential to become horse famous. It's more achievable but nonetheless it's still fame. (There's probably better terms than horse famous and fame culture but they're what I'm going with.)
The question I want to talk about is whether or not people buy and use dashcams because of fame culture or because they're afraid of being sued or both.
In the argument for "dashcams are part of fame culture", I present the subreddit Idiots in Cars. At 4 million subscribers it's not a massive sub but it's pretty big. This community exists almost exclusively to share and watch dashcam videos, although my personal favourite video is from a house mounted camera.. Clearly, there is an ecosystem in which horse fame and fame culture can manifest with respect to dashcams.
In the argument for "dashcams are the product of an overly litigious culture gradually eroding every inch of humanity in a self-absorbed stupor having reached the point where you need a dashcam as well as a fully-automated carbine rifle to protect yourself". The basic idea here is that in America, everyone is always looking to sue you and if you don't have video evidence, you're gonna get screwed. Indeed, well over half of the videos on the subreddit are from the US, which would suggest either Americans are particularly hopped up on fame culture or the only way to stop a bad guy with a car is a good guy with a dashcam.
For my part, I think I find the litigation point more compelling but, at the same time, I obviously use that subreddit so I am strongly inclined to the fame culture explanation.
What say ye, NSG? Why do people have dashcams? And if you have a dashcam, why'd you get it?
And, yes, I did say "automated". Take it up in a different thread, This one is about dashcams.
