[LINK] "Space Is Now a Reality TV Show"

[rfmcdonald]

On the one-day anniversary of Chris Hadfield's triumphant return to Earth, Megan Garber's essay at The Atlantic does a great job analyzing just why Hadfield has become such a celebrity: he has managed to leverage social networking technologies with remarkable success.

Chris Hadfield -- nom de tweet: @cmdr_hadfield -- has been doing more than inspiring people, though. He has also been entertaining them. And delighting them. He has chatted with Captain Kirk. He has covered Bowie. He has written his own music, and performed it. He has publicly celebrated Valentine's Day, and Easter, and St. Patrick's Day, and April Fool's. He has done a mind-boggling number of live chats and Q&As and video explainers. He has led Canada in a national sing-along. And all of these things have shared a remarkable predicate: They have been done, you know, from space. Hadfield has kept a running dialogue with Earth, documenting not just the numinous -- those amazing views! -- but also the mundane: the food. The fun. The exercise. The sleep. The tears. The bathroom situation.

Over the course of 144 days spent on the International Space Station (encompassing 2,336 orbits of the Earth and covering nearly 62 million miles), Hadfield didn't merely do his day job -- conducting more than 130 scientific experiments testing the effects of microgravity on masses of various types. He also helped to change our concept of what it means to be an astronaut in the first place. Hadfield is a space explorer in the Gagarin/Glenn/Armstrong model, but he is something else, too: just a guy. A guy who happens to be in space. Hadfield, availing himself of new technologies that are just beginning to be widely adopted, made space travel seem accessible. He made it seem normal (or, in astronaut-speak, "nominal"). He took it out of the realm of the awe-inspiring and placed it squarely in the realm of the awesome.

[. . .]

What Hadfield used to his advantage, [. . .] was the copious combination of social media tools that are just now coming into their prime, tools that transform documentation into conversation: Hadfield had Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook and Reddit, not to mention a public excited, especially after the successful landing the Curiosity rover last year, about space again. Not to mention a 20-person social media team eager to remind the world about Canada's role in the space program. Not to mention a doppelgänger son, Evan, who handled Hadfield's accounts when he couldn't. Not to mention a good deal of luck. (William Shatner's casual tweet to Hadfield back in January won him a flood of followers, Quartz notes, after which his popularity "became self-sustaining.")

Hadfield also had ... Chris Hadfield. He was the right guy at the right time -- and in, wow, the right place: He's a natural performer who seemed truly excited to share his sublime stage with the rest of us. But his performances were intimate rather than epic: He subtly rejected the aura of distant heroism we normally associate with space flyers. Instead, he was nerdy. He was excited. He was delightfully, winkily mustachioed. He was your dad, or your uncle, or your mentor, the kind of guy who probably gets a little choked up when he makes toasts at weddings. Which is to say: He is quirky and real, and he made a point of putting those facts to use. He took all the corporate logic of social media -- the ethos of the "personal brand," the edict of "conversation rather than presentation" -- and applied it, seamlessly, to his life in space.

Also, I quite like her McLuhanesque conclusion.

"Communications tools don't get socially interesting," Clay Shirky has argued, "until they get technologically boring." The same may be said of space. As a destination --- as a place, as a dream -- space may be, ever so slightly, losing its former mantle of foreignness, its old patina of awe. The final frontier may now be experiencing the fate that befalls any frontier: It ceases to be a frontier. Its settlers come to think of it, more and more, as an extension of what they know ... until it becomes, simply, all that they know. Until it becomes the most basic thing in the world: home.