June 19th, 2008, 3 Comments »
I’ve been in Chicago this week, speaking at Web Content 2008 (notes from my talks) and hacking up a lung. In one of my talks, I referenced the notion of micro-celebrity, and how many webby folks are famous to a couple thousand people.
Coincidentally, on Wednesday we visited the great, labyrinthine Art Institute of Chicago. While wandering through it, I spotted Britney Barber, the star of the amusing video podcast The Midwest Teen Sex Show. Not surprising, I suppose, given that we’re in the heart of the Midwest (or so somebody told me).
Ms. Barber is famous to me, so the feeling was pretty similar to past celebrity spottings. I didn’t, you know, bother her for an autograph or anything, but there was that sense of ‘hey, I usually only see you on a screen”.
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December 3rd, 2007, 10 Comments »
As you get older, you start to observe meta-trends that extend over your entire lifetime. One such trend is how celebrities–in particular, actors, singers and the talentless, pitiful super-wealthy–have spread their influence over a larger and larger part of our culture. There have always been celebrity endorsements. But then came the celebrity activist and, more recently, performers replacing models in ads in magazines. We’ve also got celebrities as brand, where a startling variety of the famous and the semi-famous are producing and selling a startling array of products.
Many of our house guests left books behind. Two of these are Eat, Pray, Love (a book that apparently every woman in Western civilization is reading) and Emily’s Reasons Why Not. I was recently pawing through our bookshelf, and noticed that both of these books had received endorsements from unlikely literary critics.
The scholarly Britney Spears is quoted on the back of Eat, Pray, Love as saying “A good read. I can’t get away from it.”. Brittany Murphy gives us a reason to read Emily’s Reasons Why Not, saying she’d like to see “Emily Sanders [the book's heroine], Bridget Jones and Carrie Bradshaw meet for lunch.” Or rather, somebody’s publicist wrote that quote for Brittany, and she signed off on it.
I do my best to ignore celebrity culture in general, and in particular the current generation of drug-addled starlets eager to crash their cars for and expose their genitals to a fervent public. When’s it going to stop? Never. It’s just a sign of the times that the average actor or singer thinks they’re a book critic. It’s a shame that the publishing industry fosters such behaviour, and a great shame that the public cares about what a drug-addicted pop star thinks of a novel.
UPDATE: I’m aware of the potential irony of this entry following one in praise of a musician turned NPR blogger. However, I don’t think Ms. Brownstein got the blogging gig because of her fame (Sleater-Kinney isn’t exactly a household name). She got it because she’s a decent writer and knows a lot about music.
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July 27th, 2007, 11 Comments »
Discuss.
I think the comparison is fairly apt. Here’s why:
- I’m guessing the audience for celebrity gossip is 80% female, and the audience for sports news is 80% male.
- Both topics are pretty trivial, yet they have vast amounts of media attention.
- Both topics fetishize the tiniest details of their subjects: “Paris Hilton goes for coffee!” “Derek Jeter has a hangnail!”
- They both seem to feature the noble and the ignoble. Lindsay Lohan gets drunk and runs into things, yet Angelina Jolie is adopting most of sub-Saharan Africa. Michael Vick is running dog fighting rings in his basement, yet, I don’t know, Steve Montador is in Africa for Right to Play.
- Both topics feature individuals who make absurd amounts of money.
That’s why David and Victoria Beckham are so enormously famous–they’re a perfect storm of celebrity and sports (and, I should add, encouragement to middle-school dropouts everywhere). I wish it helped that one of them was actually good at something, but, as we know, talent isn’t a prerequisite for fame.
What do you think?
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