Alexander Rhodes

Alexander Julian Rhodes is a production assistant and aspiring actor who began his professional career in 2012. Appearing as auxiliary roles in Jack Reacher, Won't Back Down, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Rhodes made his foray into the entertainment industry while pursuing work as a production assistance for Sonny Days and The Dark Knight Rises. Rhodes is most famous for his rise to fame after users of Reddit, a popular news aggregation website, visited his IMDB profile en masse following a post of his profile on Reddit in the context of his work on Jack Reacher, an incident which demonstrates a potential flaw in the system IMDB uses to rank the popularity of entertainment industry figures.

Family and Education
Rhodes was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to parents Althea Azeff and Phillip Rhodes with two siblings, Axel and Claire. Rhodes is currently an undergraduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, where he studies Biological Sciences and Chemistry.

Rise to Popularity
In September 2012, Rhodes posted on the popular Internet news site Reddit a comment including a screenshot of his profile. After a number of Reddit users accessed his profile out of curiosity, Rhodes' profile vaulted upward in popularity, causing it to rise in the cast list order for Jack Reacher -- the order of which is determined by the popularity of the individual actors as assessed by the number of times each actor's profile is viewed during the most recent week. After Rhodes posted a follow-up note expressing his surprise at moving up to directly follow well-known actor Richard Jenkins in the cast list, Reddit users flocked to IMDB in an effort to raise Rhodes' IMDB popularity ranking in an effort to surpass even that of Tom Cruise in order to gain the top spot on the Jack Reacher credits, urged on by Reddit user wtfizzle. As users commented, Rhodes rose 311,000 places in the IMDB rankings in a matter of days.

Since his rise to acclaim, Rhodes has managed his public appearance with the assistance of his friends through his Facebook page, Twitter account , and Reddit account. While initial reports of this incident cast Rhodes' rise in a comedic light as an industry outsider, numerous media outlets continue to cite and follow this meteoric rise to fame with increasing seriousness. As Reddit commentators note, Rhodes currently sits at the #8 spot on IMDB's overall popularity rankings, with Reddit users speculating about the future potential for positive career opportunities as a result. Rhodes is currently represented by Nick Roses, a Manager at Total Talent Management.

Effect of Viral Online Activity
The rise of Alexander Rhodes to Internet fame is an example of the powerful effect of viral marketing, similar to the surge in fame and popularity of a young woman named Lania, now better known as the "Overly Attached Girlfriend" and other recent figures. Rhodes and Lania both demonstrate an effect by which systems designed to reflect and measure the popularity of people and topics by an audience in turn impact the popularity of those figures. In this case, the online movie catalog site IMDB is used to deliver content about movies and people in the entertainment industry to a global audience, while at the same time estimating the popularity of those subjects based on the number of visits to the pages concerning each subject. As a result, topics can become popular as a result of being interesting to viewers, resulting in an amplification effect -- becoming more popular simply for being popular.