20 min version of talk Introduction • Hi everyone, thanks for getting up especially after last night! • I’m Alice, I’m a PhD student at NYU in Media, Culture, and Communication. • I study internet culture so I’m in the right place this weekend • Right now I’m working on a project about social status and elitism in Web 2.0 • I did a discussion at SXSW about this, and instead of talking about elitism, everyone wanted to talk about celebrity • I found that people were fascinated with internet celebrity • Instead of just describing internet celebrity, because I think most of you guys are way more expert than I am, I want to start by talking about how we think about celebrity in general and how different kinds of internet celebrities fit into this. Status • So my pet topic is “status” • Status is your position, or your standing, in society • And every kind of social group has a status hierarchy: whether it’s a classroom or a SIG or a cheerleading squad. • The people at the top of this hierarchy are going to demonstrate whatever qualities the group thinks are important: so in a cheerleading squad it might be gymnastic ability, looks, popularity, and charisma, whereas in a graduate program it could be intelligence, publications, and a modicum of social skills • Status reflects the values of a community. Fame • So in some ways fame is status on a grand scale. • Fame means that lots of people know you, who you don’t know. It means you have the ability to command the attention of other people, and you have a kind of power because of that. • But fame also represents value, it represents the ultimate recognition. • Even the most grotesque or obvious social climbing or famewhoring is connected to our regular social desires to be recognized for our achievements or our own uniqueness. • But people tend to see fame as a sort of a catch-all solution to personal problems, despite the obvious fact that celebs are always collapsing from exhaustion, going bankrupt, appearing on Celebrity Rehab and other unsavory outcomes. Kids and Fame • Jake Halperin’s book Fame Junkies follows wanna-be child stars as they take classes at strip-mall modeling schools like Barbizon and John Casablancas • He surveys hundreds of high school kids on their desires to become famous. • He finds the same things that we see in the American Idol audition specials: I want this more than anything. This is my destiny. If I just work hard and try my best, I know I will succeed. • He found that among teenagers who watched shows like Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood every day, 65% believed they had at least a fifty percent chance of becoming famous. • But what is that they want? What does celebrity signify? The high school kids in the survey wanted the trappings of celebrity – the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, the Fabulous Life of the Olsen Twins, the Cribs, the car, clothes, and jewelry. • But as we know the realities of fame and the promises of fame don’t quite match up. • This is because celebrity means SUCCESS. It becomes a catchall for all the best things in our society. It is the ultimate reward of individualism, the ultimate success. Becoming famous, we think, means things are perfect forever. Let’s talk about the pursuit of fame. • When theorists decry celebrity culture, and contemporary pop culture in general, for being stupid, shallow, and worthless, they miss something. • What is it about daily life that causes so many people to want fame in the first place? • Perhaps the slim career prospects for the primarily working-class teenagers on American Idol are what causes them to daydream about being the next Kelly Clarkson. • Perhaps the lack of creative fulfillment in most people’s jobs, the isolation of suburban life? • “Celebrity” becomes the cure for what ails you: a better, brighter, more fulfilling self. Meritocracy • The cultural logic of celebrity tells you that this life can be yours if you just aim high enough or try hard enough. • The tech world, and American society overall, both depend to a great extent on the myth of meritocracy and individualism. • You all know this story. • Small town girl moves to the big city to make it big. Lives off ramen noodles and Diet Coke until she gets a finally lands a part in a movie. Then another movie. Then her big break, and like her character in Pretty Woman, Julia Roberts is introduced as America’s next great movie star. • Rags to riches, Horatio Alger, whatever you call it, we are all familiar with the key elements of this narrative. Rags to Riches Ideology • Of course the reality of the VH1 Behind the Music sequence is where the celebrity believes his or her own hype, gets caught up with hookers and blow, reforms, and finally ends up hosting a Christian cooking show on local cable. • But the myth has an ideological function. • It is the purported proof of the inherent democracy in the celebrity system. • Brad Pitt started out wearing a chicken suit and hawking El Pollo Loco on the street corner; Madonna worked at Dunkin Donuts. • This says Stars! They ARE just like us, or at least they were; • And no matter how outrageous and crazy their lives become, it gives us hope that this could happen to us. Not democratic • Why is this ideological? • Because it obscures the fact that celebrity is NOT democratic. There are millions of people who work hard their entire lives, and can barely make a living wage, let alone live in a mansion and have a drugstore perfume named after them. • It is a myth that all of us, universally, can have potential success if all we do is work hard. • Not only does this myth ignore structural inequality in the social system that makes this impossible for many, it serves to mask the celebrity system and how it functions. But that system is unraveling • On one hand, we have conventional superstars like George Clooney and Angelina Jolie • Known for good looks, movies, personal lives. • Obviously they’re actors, but their public personas are much larger than their bodies of work. • On the other, we have tabloid stars like Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt, stars of the vague MTV reality show The Hills, known for their uncanny ability to attract and manipulate the paparazzi. • Entire industry has grown up around these “pseudo - celebrities” – Paris Hilton, Lindsey Lohan, Nicole Richie, Lauren Conrad, Britney Spears: all known more for their fame, than for their achievements. These female tabloid stars embody modern celebrity culture: gossip blogs, paparazzi and intense scrutiny. And this is really what our popular view of celebrity has become. • Heidi and Spencer’s frolicking for the camera doesn’t pretend to be authentic, or meaningful, or natural, or spontaneous or even tied to any kind of creative product or achievement. They are celebrities for celebrity’s sake. Their existence depends on dissemination and reproduction of their own images. And if they didn’t exist, the tabloids would invent them. Paparazzi • The rise of affordable digital photography and videography has greatly expanded the reach of the celebrity image, the market for it and the production of it. • In the last ten years we have watched paparazzi infiltrate every aspect of celebrity culture. • Party photographers like The Cobra Snake became celebrities in their own right, and then made celebrities out of nobodies like 16 year old Corey Kennedy, a jailbait fashionista whose parents didn’t know about her double life as an internet It girl until Nylon magazine published photographs of her. • Paparazzi photos have become visual “proof” of stardom, to the point where Westchester, NY firm Party with the Paparazzi provides fake photographers, videographers, and even news reporters to wealthy teenagers for their super sweet sixteens. • This trickles down -- Facebook photo albums become “proof” of what you were up to the night before, who you were with, and what cool ass thing you were doing. • MySpace profile pictures emulate glamour shots, often photoshopped and manipulated just like magazine covers. Publicity Culture • So what this permeation of celebrity culture into day to day lives shows is that we live in a celebrity-oriented society. • History writer Neil Gabler says it’s not that celebrity-oriented societies completely lack morals. • Instead, in a celebrity-oriented society, or what Jodi Dean calls a “publicity culture”, we value whatever grabs the public’s attention. Not what’s serious, or difficult, or important, or complicated. Performance Culture • But a publicity culture is also one where we prize social skills that encourage performance. • Whether you’re a call center worker, a nurse, or a college professor, the path to advancement is extroversion and public-relations finesse. • We are increasingly encouraged to self-market and self-brand, to construct public personas to get dates and jobs • Service work often requires “emotional labor” – connecting, networking, and managing to maintain, or convincingly fake, relationships with other people. • Our highly capitalist, highly-service oriented economy, has adopted what I call the “cultural logic” of celebrity. Cultural Logic of Celebrity • More than just publicity, the cultural logic of celebrity values interaction, notoriety, recognition as rewards in themselves • Celebrity is laid out as the ultimate achievement, what everyone should be striving for • We value the ability to create yourself for a public, displaying yourself in a public way. • The cultural logic of celebrity, then, is one way to explain internet fame – the explosion in affordable, accessible technological tools and skills has just compounded social forces that already existed. • We understand it because increasingly that’s how we see ourselves. Definition of Microcelebrity • Terri Senft, in her book Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in the Age of Social Networks, defines microcelebrity • Performance style where people use webcams, video, audio, blogs, and social networking sites to boost popularity with readers, viewers, and people they’re linked to online. • Micro-celebrity is about closeness and accountability. Microcelebrities respond to fans, know their fans, and, are basically obligated to continue this interaction. • In some ways this breaks down the spectator/spectacle dichotomy of traditional celebrity • Rather than an audience mindlessly watching a famous performer, someone they cannot access or know beyond a carefully constructed image • the microcelebrity brings a feeling of accessibility and, in some senses, equality This means that microcelebrity is not the poor man’s version of television or movie celebrities. We use the term “celebrity” because that’s the best word we have to describe a new type of subjectivity, a new type of understanding person-hood and individuality that necessitates a mass society: an audience. And this type of performance is linked to the permeation of the logic of celebrity into the fabric of our day to day lives. Anedote: Magibon • Some of you may be familiar with Magibon, YouTube idol who gained rapid worldwide fame for her cam videos, • Show her staring at the camera with big eyes, blinking, occasionally saying a few Japanese phrases • Acting “burikko” , which is a Japanese word that means acting exaggeratedly girlishly cute, usually to attract guys. • This video, for example, has had three million hits, so obviously it has worked Show Magibon video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kib05Ip6GSo Magibon 2 • Magibon has appeared in the New York Times and on countless A-list blogs • But Magibon is not Japanese; she’s from rural Pennsylvania. And like many other American teenagers, she has a passion for Japanese culture, films, anime, and language. • Recently a Japanese television station made a dream come true for her, and sponsored a trip for her to Japan, with the proviso that she would appear on the show. • They surprised her, as you can see ] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHVlGx5XY7I&e • Rather than the adorable, big-eyed kawaii pin-up she appeared to be on YouTube, she came off an awkward, nervous teenager, uncomfortable in a situation where she could not control her image. Downfall? • Many people have delighted in this discrepancy between her public internet celebrity profile and this somewhat disastrous public appearance- the schadenfreude (shadan – freud – a) of a faux-Japanese Keane doll being exposed as a regular young American girl. • Magibon is a victim of “internet disease” – the phenomenon where internet dating profiles and MySpace pictures are tweaked to make the creator seem thinner, sexier, and younger than they appear in real life. Unraveling • But Magibon also demonstrates other key elements of today’s celebrity culture. • In the 1970s and 1980s, the inner wrappings of fame began to unravel. • While in the 1950s, some fans might have believed that Lana Turner was discovered at a soda fountain, • In the modern age one of the pleasures of celebrity became exposing the realities of the celebrity publicity machine. Pseudo-Events • Daniel Boorstin’s pioneering work on “pseudo-events” argued that the press conference and the ribbon-cutting ceremony were events that existed only to be televised. • Their meaning was otherwise non-existent; they were fabricated, inauthentic, and theatrical. • Now, People understand what it means to choreograph an event entirely for the benefit of the media—a “photo op.” We accept Heidi and Spencer’s ridiculousness because we understand what’s behind it: a raw drive for celebrity. • The artificial nature of celebrity magazine profiles and red carpet events is now completely visible. Game Players • Joshua Gamson, a sociologist of celebrity, has written about “game players”, • Audiences who adopt a playful attitude towards the world of celebrities, gossiping, sharing tidbits, and engaging in collective detective work to discover who the celebrity “really” is. • This idea, that there is an authentic self somewhere deep down buried in the fleshy body of Tom Cruise or Angelina Jolie, is one of the major distinctions between celebrity and microcelebrity. Microcelebs and Authenticity • Because to a certain extent we assume that microcelebrities are who they purport to be. • They often engage in copious interactions with their audiences, they reveal the intimate details of their thoughts, dreams, food consumption, and sex lives, and they present personas that are less controlled than those of highly-regulated, highly-consumer brand oriented film and television celebrities. • One of the appeals of internet celebrities may be that they are more “authentic” than the manufactured celebrities of tabloids and MTV. • So what Magibon’s unfortunate expose reveals is that the backlash against internet celebrities can be very damning when an “inauthentic” person is revealed. • The venom with which online sources like Encyclopedia Dramatica systematically set out to destroy her vlogging career is very similar to that impulse which fuels “Celebrity Cellulite” stories on the cover of US Weekly. • Perhaps with “regular” celebrity being so constructed, internet celebrity provides a quirkier, cooler, weirder alternative; and when our internet celebrities turn out to be regular, fallible people, therein lies the disappointment. Desire for Fame • But is this true? Is internet celebrity somehow better, realer, more honest than traditional celebrity? • Before we do this I want to make some really important distinctions. • Because we throw around this term “internet celebrity” but that means a lot of things. • When Forbes does their 25 top Web celebs, they’re mostly talking about famous tech bloggers. • But that’s only one particular culture that has internet celebrities. Taxonomy • The old distinction between “heroes,” “stars,” and “celebrities” was that heroes were celebrated for their achievements, stars were celebrated for their talent or beauty, and celebrities were just famous for being famous. • In an age where fame is achievement, I don’t think these distinctions really hold true, and I don’t think they’re enough. So I want to create a new taxonomy of modern internet fame. This is important because otherwise we end up lumping gothic fetish models and Michael Arrington in the same bucket. Which is gross. So let’s make the first distinction: those who seek celebrity, and those who have celebrity thrust upon them. My first category is Careerist Promoters • Those who seek celebrity do so for various reasons. • The cultural logic of celebrity has infiltrated so many occupations that blatant self-promotion is stock-in-trade now for up and coming rap stars and actresses, but also academics, journalists, science-fiction authors, fashion designers, freelance web developers. • I was told by an older academic that the single most important thing I could do for my career was to maintain a blog regularly. (I have one, but it’s updated so rarely that I think I’m fully failing in that regard). • So one type of intentional promoters might be people who maintain an internet presence to further their offline careers or activities. • My poster child for this is Julia Allison, the Star Magazine journalist who has used the web to further a carefully constructed image of herself as the RL Carrie Bradshaw. Creative Promoters • Then there are those who produce a creative product. • If I’m an artist, video blogger, and so forth, I’m seeking recognition based on what it is that I create, not just my own persona. • This is INTENTIONAL. • While there is obviously self-promotion, it’s being done to push your Etsy store, blog, podcast interview, or your latest supercut montage. Bloggers, vloggers, comic artists, fan fiction writers, and so forth would fall into this category. Self-Promoters • And also in the category of intentional fame, we have people who are promoters, but they’re promoting themselves as a product. • A great example of this are the scenequeens of Buzznet. • Scenequeens are young women who are party girls and amateur indie models who dress up in outrageous outfits, sell posters of themselves, promote parties, appear in fashion shows, and do other semi-famous, glitterati type activities, all to promote... themselves. • They have big fan bases of fifteen year olds, they have an entire Livejournal community “lolscenequeens” which exists to make fun of them, and they are experts at packaging themselves for consumption by others. • They use the logic of microcelebrity in an attempt to gain the traditional spoils of celebrity: fame and fortune in a very NY, LA kind of way. Reluctant Celebrities • Then there are those who find fame inadvertently. • The poster child for this type of thing is the Star Wars kid, whose story doesn’t need repeating with this audience. • Because of the internet’s magical ability to spread information rapidly, someone with no desire to become famous can become notorious very quickly. • While some of the inadvertent celebrities end up enjoying their newfound fame, others find it disturbing, distressing, and even deeply troubling. • So each of these different categories of internet celebrities is going to relate to fame and publicity in different ways. Internet Celebrity is different? • So if we believe that celebrity is democratic, then we definitely believe that internet celebrity is more democratic. • In 2005 and 2006, there was a lot of talk about how YouTube was revolutionizing the entertainment industry and “democratizing” celebrity. • YouTube star Brookers signed a development deal with Carson Daly, the “Lazy Sunday” video propelled Andy Samberg to mainstream fame, and The New Yorker profiled Stevie Ryan, the creator of Lil Loca, along with a number of other viral video makers. • This theory says that technologies like YouTube or MySpace allow ordinary citizens to participate directly in mainstream media, and to become celebrities themselves. Truth? • On one hand, it is definitely true that the internet has allowed people to distribute their own creative content to audiences that would have been unimaginable ten years ago. • And it’s very true that many of the people in this room have huge audiences that they got without anything from mainstream media • But this has limits Limits • It goes without saying that internet fame can be even more fleeting and ephemeral than “regular” fame. • Often, internet celebrity depends on the legitimizing function of other forms of media. We know Tron Guy has really made it as an internet celebrity because he was on Jimmy Kimmell. We know Tila Tequila had transcended her internet fame when she got a show on MTV. Economics • Internet celebrity rarely has the financial success that we think of going hand in hand with traditional celebrity • Oftentimes, celebrities are making money FOR a large, corporate site like MySpace or YouTube • Even with YouTube’s switch to a more profit-sharing model, that affects very few people and the free labor of user-created content is what really got the site off the ground • So just like traditional celebrities, many internet celebrities are deeply enmeshed in a consolidated, corporate media system. Image • And often, those who bubble up to the top are those who fit a certain image. • Is internet culture overall actually subverting or resisting the VALUES of the status quo? • If we’re going to criticize mainstream media for being limited, fake, only showing certain kinds of people, furthering certain discourses, we need to turn that same critical lens on our own community. • I think that internet culture can be very racist, very sexist, and very homophobic • On YouTube, many of the most successful vloggers are conventionally attractive girls • Sexist, racist, or homophobic comments are very common • Gay content is often flagged as inappropriate no matter what it’s about. • In the blogosphere, the most popular blogs are written by white guys, even though most blogs are written by women. • Even in progressive areas like the feminist blogosphere, there are big conflicts with issues pertaining to women of color, class, etc. being ignored in favor of more “mainstream” issues specific to middle-class white women • I think that internet celebrity rarely does anything to challenge the overall social forces that support the status quo. • And that is not to say that everyone has to be an activist, but if we’re creating an alternative to the mainstream, wouldn’t it make sense to change or criticize some of the mainstream values that we don’t like? Subcultural • Internet celebrities are inherently subcultural. • You could call the internet itself as represented at ROFLCON a subculture; the internet of lolcats and Anonymous and RickRolling is a very particular internet, a specific set of communities, people, and possibilities. It is not everyone online. • Momus, who famously coined the term “famous to fifteen people”, wrote an essay in 1991 predicting the splintering of the monolithic music industry. He wrote that walking through a record store enabled him to view an “infinite number of worlds at different stages of their evolution.” • Rather than a Top 40, there were now the worlds of hardcore, alt.country, blues, girl punk, ska, hip hop, indie folk, industrial, drum and bass. Each one of these music worlds had its own status system, its own superstars, and its own progression. This is the internet. Localized • These infinite numbers of worlds are nodes on the network. • And these worlds bring with them certain types of being, ways of seeing, and languages. They are cultures. • The Google Idol karaoke circuit. Academics who play World of Warcraft. Emos. Scenequeens. Crafters. • Investigating any one of these worlds is like opening a door that reveals a fully-articulated, fully developed social structure behind it, complete with in-jokes, vocabulary, canon, celebrities, and fandom. • In this context, like status, internet celebrities epitomize the apex of success within that subculture. • For instance, the tech pundit community values connectivity, information, and knowledge about the latest gadgets, venture capital, and startups. The crafter community values creativity, originality, and productivity. The “scenequeen” community values beauty, celebrity, and publicity. So each internet culture has a set of qualities that their biggest stars embody. Small Community • This is because micro-celebrity intrinsically exists within a small community. • Everyone in this room may know who Robert Scoble, Julia Allison, Perez Hilton, Kevin Rose, Kelly, or Chris Crocker is, • But I also suspect that every person in this room has their own “internet celebrities” who mean something to them, but may mean nothing to me, or the person sitting next to you. Doesn’t Translate • This location in a subculture means that even the largest web celebrities, like Tila Tequila, don’t necessarily translate to the non-web world. • At the height of her MySpace popularity, Tila refused to sign with a major label, retaining creative control and believing that her enormous MySpace fan base would happily pay for her songs. • As it turns out, she was wrong. Only 13,000 people bought her debut single. Digg/Rickroll • Similarly, Digg users campaigned to get the New York Mets to adopt “Never Gonna Give You Up” as their 8th inning singalong song • There were 5 million votes for Rick Astley, • But someone in the Mets organization figured out what was up and decided to give Mets fans, the actual people who showed up at the ballpark, a choice of six different songs. • Mr. Astley was soundly booed. Because internet humor isn’t universal humor. It’s localized. CONCLUSION • In today’s world, celebrity exists at the intersection of democracy and capitalism. The meritocratic myth of celebrity proves the possibility of success in an individualistic, but democratic, culture. • And the celebrity is a human subject designed to be consumed like an object, the ultimate encroachment of capitalism on to the individual. • While internet celebrities certainly use these same logics of capitalism and branding, they do so on a different scale. • They are not typically tied to major entertainment products or Big Media. They are often disconnected from traditional consumption and completely enthused by a peculiar labor of love. Fame as a Drug • One final theory of internet celebrity is the idea of fame as a “drug of validation.” • Educational programs that emphasize self-esteem • Have created a generation of narcissists • Combined with a superficial, soft-news culture that emphasizes shallowness and vapidity, • Publicity, looks, sexual display or outrageousness become a substitute for character, personality development, creativity, or career achievement. • Technology itself becomes a culprit for what is seen as the “problem” of internet celebrity. • Without the internet, there would be no net.celebrities; • Social networking sites, blogs, mobile devices and digital cameras encourage an always-on culture of “continuous partial attention” and life as reality television. • Movies like Cloverfield and Day of the Dead argue that participatory culture reduces us all to a nation of mediated sheep, blankly broadcasting our every whim and thought to a disinterested audience and a rapacious marketing industry. Positive? • I was originally going to end with positioning microcelebrity as a positive alternative to mainstream, Big Media culture. And overall that is what I believe. • But I want to interject a critical voice into a conference that, rightly, has been about celebrating internet culture. • Let’s think about the voices who get heard and who doesn’t get heard. Who do we want to hear? What do we want to happen? Who do we want to be? • Rather than just fueling a cycle of novelty, I want to see microcelebrity use these techniques of accountability, feedback and personal relationships in a transformative way. • If this is the culture we’re creating, that we’re building, as internet nerds, let’s make it a culture that matters. Thank you.