Mahir Çağrı: I Kiss You

1999

Date: August 1999 · Place: İzmir, Turkey · Figures: Mahir Çağrı, journalist and accordion player · Tags: Personal Homepage, Accidental Virality, Pre-Influencer 01. I Like Sex Mahir Çağrı, a 36-year-old Turkish journalist and accordion player living in İzmir, builds a homepage on a Sezer Internet server in November 1998. It contains photographs of him in a Speedo, playing accordion, and beside a Mercedes. The captions, in broken English, are sincere: I like sex, Welcome to my home page!!!!!!!!!, I kiss you!!!!!. It is, by any measure he intends, a personal page meant to attract pen-friends. In August 1999 someone on a US forum links it as a joke. Within a month it has millions of visitors. 02. The Subject Becomes The Author Mahir is the first person in internet history to be made famous by his own page being passed around to mock him, and the first to successfully reclaim it. He flies to the US, appears on Letterman, releases a single, gets a column in a Turkish newspaper, and runs for the Istanbul parliament. He is the prototype of the involuntary internet celebrity, and the prototype of the involuntary internet celebrity who pivots, with grace and a complete lack of self-consciousness, into the role. "WELLCOME TO MY HOME PAGE !!!!!!!!! I KISS YOU !!!!!" — Mahir Çağrı, ikissyou.org, c. November 1998 Sources • The Independent, 'Mahir: the man who kissed the world' (Justin Huggler, 22 January 2000) • Wired, 'Turkey's Cyber-Citizen' (Steve Kettmann, 26 January 2000) • Know Your Meme, 'I Kiss You (Mahir Cagri)'