Instant fame!(internet sensation Alex Lee) (Cover story)

• Author: Bilton, Nick

Target cashier Alex Lee became a star when someone posted his photo online. Is that all it takes to become famous today?

A few months ago, 16-year-old Alex Lee was just a typical teenage boy.

He woke up at 7 a.m. for school. He got into trouble for not taking out the trash. His small bedroom in Frisco, Texas, was a mess: clothes all over the floor, an unmade bed, and posters of a Mustang GT on the walls. He had 144 Twitter followers.

Then on Sunday, November 2, his life was turned upside down. As Alex clocked in for his shift at SuperTarget and took his place behind the cash register, a teenage girl in England randomly came across a photo on Tumblr of Alex at work. She thought he was cute and posted the picture on her Twitter account with the caption "YOOOOOOOOOO."

Within minutes, the image went viral. Shortly after, the hashtag #AlexFromTarget became a trending topic on Twitter, and Alex fever exploded on social media.

Later that afternoon, Alex noticed that his checkout line was unusually long and filled with young girls. The crowds looking to snap a photo of Alex got so out of hand that he had to work in the stockroom for the rest of his shift. When he finally left work and turned on his phone, it was flooded with messages.

"I was getting tons of texts," Alex says. "They're all saying, This is crazy, you're famous!' "

He had more than 100,000 followers by the time he got home from work. Still unsure of what had happened or what his sudden surge in followers meant, Alex tweeted, "Am I famous now?" He got his answer two days later when he was flown to Los Angeles to appear on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. (Paparazzi were waiting for him outside his hotel.)

In the past, stardom for actors, musicians, or writers often came after years of toiling in obscurity, but many of today's stars have catapulted to fame overnight. Justin Bieber was discovered on YouTube; Snooki and JWoww made names for themselves on MTV's reality show Jersey Shore. But Alex represents an even newer path to celebrity: It's one where talent and hard work--or even the desire to be famous--are no longer the only avenues to stardom; and traditional gatekeepers like movie directors, music producers, and publishers aren't choosing the next big thing.

"With the Internet, we don't need the mass media to tell us who we should be paying attention to," says David Weinberger of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Weinberger says Alex's story is a perfect...