Web Celebs: now anyone can be famous for 60 seconds

1. Where All the Beautiful People Are Ho-Hum – by JOHN LELAND (from NY Times)

A QUICK measure of fame in 2006: Lazydork is up, Tom Cruise is down. Mr. Cruise is one of the most expensively maintained and promoted celebrities in the world, known to people who have little else in common; Lazydork is a soft-around-the-middle young man seen dancing shirtless on the video-sharing Web site YouTube.com, a platform that has already made stars of adolescent guitar players, pancake flippers and, most spectacularly, a character named Lonelygirl15, who appeared to be an ordinary teenager talking to a Web camera about her life.

The fortunes of Mr. Cruise and Lazydork illustrated a recent twist on Andy Warhol ’s famous dictum: In the YouTube era, everyone will be famous to 15 people.

Though Lazydork’s audience exceeds 15 people, his fame is wholly partitioned within a niche medium that most people don’t think about, and dependent on his audience’s belief that he is a regular person, not a celebrity. A promise of Lazydork is not that he is spectacular, but that he is ordinary; if he deserved his fame, he probably wouldn’t have it.

In an era when anyone can have a celebrity following (at least a small one), his popularity raises questions about the meaning of fame: If someone is celebrated for not being a celebrity, does celebrity itself still have any value?

The YouTube stars’ rise, viewed against the recent decision of Viacom head Sumner Redstone to cut loose Mr. Cruise — in part because of his erratic behavior, in part, some suggest, because stars have become too expensive — illustrates the thesis of Chris Anderson’s book “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More,” which proposes that new technology favors niche products or niche celebrities at the expense of unifying megablockbusters.

“I would call that a flattening of celebrity,” Mr. Anderson said. “There’s more celebrities, so the nature of celebrity is devalued. We’re moving into an era of microhits and ministars, where your celebrity may not be my celebrity, and you may not have heard of mine.”

This fame collides in interesting ways with technology, said Clay Shirky, adjunct professor at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University .

“On some deep level, fame is more people paying attention to you than you can reciprocate,” he said. “That hasn’t changed. But now you have that fundamental imbalance filtered through a new technology with new expectations, including interactivity and egalitarianism.”

Where traditional celebrities are elevated above their audience, and invested with exalted qualities, new-model celebrities are expected to be no better than their audience — maybe worse. We don’t expect Denzel Washington to read his fan mail, but we expect Lonelygirl to answer her e-mail.

At a time when fame is both fiercely desired and toxic to the bearer, the YouTube stars present a model of celebrity that has all the benefits of anonymity, along with the small paychecks. When they step outside the site, they can walk the streets in peace; and when they return, they are as famous to their various microcults as Tom Cruise or Paris Hilton.

“People like Lonelygirl have discovered a truth about celebrity, which is that celebrity is a narrative form, not a status,” said Neal Gabler, a senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California . “They understand that if you create a narrative, you create a celebrity. You don’t need movie studios or television.”

But as a narrative, celebrity doesn’t demand that its stories be well-crafted or complex — just that they grab someone’s attention for a minute, said Ken Goffman, better known as R.U. Sirius, publisher and podcaster of mondoglobo.net , a free-flowing discussion of culture and technology. After all, it’s one thing to watch a Hollywood movie — however bad — and another to watch someone dance with his shirt off.

“It’s a double-edge sword, not just in the cheapening of celebrity, but the cheapening of the quality of the work people seek out, liking stuff that’s just quirky but not necessarily brilliant,” Mr. Goffman said.

And in way, by flattening celebrity, the culture loses its traditional organizing principles — who’s up, down, worthy and over.

“We’re moving from a representation culture, where celebrities or stars represented us, to a presentation culture, where we can present ourselves,” said P. David Marshall, a professor of communication studies at Northeastern University and author of “Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture.”

“It’s actually quite unsettling for the way we organize influence and power,” he said. “We begin to look to uncelebrated individuals, like a girl alone with her Web camera. And we recognize that they disappear faster than the organized system of producing celebrities. The churn is astounding.”

It is tempting to say, ’twas ever thus. But ’twasn’t, said Leo Braudy, professor of English at the University of Southern California and author of “The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History.”

Momentary fame, he said, is now “available to anybody, but that’s not really fame in the ancient view. Fame originally meant after you’re dead. ‘Undying fame’ is the phrase in Indo-European traditions. In a world with little media, that was considered an accomplishment, that people would talk about you when you’re gone.”

Now fame is spread horizontally, across instantaneous electronic networks, rather than deeply, over time. For Lazydork, alas, the concept of fame itself — something lasting, to be remembered for generations afterward — may be as fleeting as today’s celebrities.


2. A Web of Exhibitionists -- by Robert J. Samuelson (from the Washington Post)

Call it the ExhibitioNet. It turns out that the Internet has unleashed the greatest outburst of mass exhibitionism in human history. Everyone may not be entitled, as Andy Warhol once suggested, to 15 minutes of fame. But everyone is entitled to strive for 15 minutes -- or 30, 90 or much more. We have blogs, "social networking" sites (MySpace.com, Facebook), YouTube and all their rivals. Everything about these sites is a scream for attention. Look at me. Listen to me. Laugh with me -- or at me.

This is no longer fringe behavior. MySpace has 56 million American "members." Facebook -- which started as a site for college students and has expanded to high school students and others -- has 9 million members. (For the unsavvy: MySpace and Facebook allow members to post personal pages with pictures and text.) About 12 million American adults (8 percent of Internet users) blog, estimates the Pew Internet & American Life Project. YouTube -- a site where anyone can post home videos -- says 100 million videos are watched daily.

Exhibitionism is now a big business. In 2005 Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. bought MySpace for a reported $580 million. All these sites aim to make money, mainly through ads and fees. What's interesting culturally and politically is that their popularity contradicts the belief that people fear the Internet will violate their right to privacy. In reality, millions of Americans are gleefully discarding -- or at least cheerfully compromising -- their right to privacy. They're posting personal and intimate stuff in places where thousands or millions can see it.

People seem to crave popularity or celebrity more than they fear the loss of privacy. Some of this extroversion is crass self-promotion. The Internet is a cheap way to advertise ideas and projects. Anyone can post a video on YouTube, free; you can start a blog free (some companies don't charge for "hosting" a site). Last week a popular series of videos -- Lonelygirl15 -- on YouTube was revealed to be a scripted drama, written by three aspiring filmmakers, and not a teenager's random meditations.

But the ExhibitioNet is more than a marketing tool. The same impulse that inspires people to spill their guts on "Jerry Springer" or to participate in "reality TV" shows (MTV's "The Real World" and its kin) has now found a mass outlet. MySpace aims at an 18-to-34-year-old audience; many of the pages are proudly raunchy. U.S. News & World Report recently described MySpace as "Lake Wobegon gone horribly wrong: a place where all the women are fast [and] the men are hard-drinking."

The blogosphere is often seen as mainly a political arena. That's a myth. According to the Pew estimates, most bloggers (37 percent) focus on "my life and personal experiences." Politics and government are a very distant second (11 percent), followed by entertainment (7 percent) and sports (6 percent). Even these figures may exaggerate the importance of politics. Half of bloggers say they're mainly interested in expressing themselves "creatively."

Self-revelation and attitude are what seem to appeal. Heather Armstrong maintains one of the most popular personal blogs (Dooce.com). "I never had a cup of coffee until I was 23-years-old," she writes. "I had premarital sex for the first time at age 22, but BY GOD I waited an extra year for the coffee." She started her blog in 2001, got fired from her job as a Web designer in Los Angeles for writing about work ("My advice to you is BE YE NOT SO STUPID."), became "an unemployed drunk," got married and moved to Salt Lake City, where she had a child.

Armstrong is a graceful and often funny writer. ("I am no longer a practicing Mormon or someone who believes that Rush Limbaugh speaks to God. My family is understandably disappointed.") The popular site now has so many ads that her husband quit his job. Recent postings include an ode to her 2-year-old daughter, a story about her dog and a plug for her friend Maggie's book, "No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog." Idea No. 32: breaking up. Naturally, Armstrong expounds on her busted relationships.

Up to a point, the blogs and "social networking" sites represent new forms of electronic schmoozing -- extensions of e-mail and instant messaging. What's different is the undiluted passion for self-publicity. But even among the devoted, there are occasional doubts about whether this is all upside. Facebook recently announced a new service. Its computers would regularly scan the pages of its members and flash news of the latest postings as headlines to their friends' pages. There was an uproar. Suppose your girlfriend decides she's had enough. The potential headline to your pals: "Susan dumps George." Countless students regarded the relentless electronic snooping and automatic messaging as threatening -- "stalking," as many put it. Facebook modified the service by allowing members to opt out.

The larger reality is that today's exhibitionism may last a lifetime. What goes on the Internet often stays on the Internet. Something that seems harmless, silly or merely impetuous today may seem offensive, stupid or reckless in two weeks, two years or two decades. Still, we are clearly at a special moment. Thoreau famously remarked that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." Thanks to technology, that's no longer necessary. People can now lead lives of noisy and ostentatious desperation. Or at least they can try.