(2006-08-08) New Media Celibrity

A few recent pieces relating to Celebrity in the New Media Attention Economy:

• "Moguls of New Media" is about MySpace hubs and PodCasting stars. "DickClark makes more money in his sleep producing things than he ever does on camera." Messrs. Nichols and Sarine are looking for a way around a problem that affects virtually every Internet star. Even if they become wildly popular, amateur podcasters and video producers can rarely make a living from their newfound fame. Podcasts and do-it-yourself videos are generally free to watch online, and even those few creators who manage to attract advertisers seldom make much money... "There's no manual. Everybody wants to lock them up and figure it out later."

• an article about Reality Tv shows involving the Creative Class notes Says Kara Janx, who finished fourth on last season's Runway: Celebrity "is part and parcel of being a designer today. When people know the person behind the brand, they become invested in it."

• Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) says Reality Tv opened the door for people to be more accepting of documentaries.

• Rob Walker on "The Brand Under Ground" quotes a chucklhead "How do I turn my Life Style into a business? (Life StyleCompany)".

  • And yet thousands and thousands of young people who are turned off by the world of shopping malls and WalMart-s and who can't bear the thought of a 9-to-5 job are pursuing a path similar to A-Ron's. Some design furniture and housewares or leverage do-it-yourself-craft skills into businesses or simply convert their consumer taste into blog-enabled trend-spotting careers. Some make toys, paint sneakers or open gallerylike boutiques that specialize in the offerings of product-artists. Many of them clearly see what they are doing as not only noncorporate but also somehow anticorporate: making statements against the materialistic mainstream - but doing it with different forms of materialism. In other words, they see products and brands as viable forms of creative expression.

  • He was figuring out that he had the option of becoming, in effect, a corporate muse. But he concluded that there was no reason to rent his coolness and knowingness to other companies. The point of aNYthing was to turn his lifestyle into his own business (Life StyleCompany).

  • Perhaps the first lesson of the brand underground is not that savvy young people will stop buying symbols of rebellion. It is that they have figured out that they can sell those symbols, too. (further down the Adoption Life Cycle)

  • With the Web, a relative handful of fanatics scattered around the world can look like a scene, and if enough people buy into that idea, then eventually it becomes a scene.

  • In his 1934 memoir, "Exile's Return," Malcolm Cowley asserted that by 1920 the Bohemian "doctrine" of Greenwich Village could be broken down to eight key points. Several of these remain fairly timeless markers of Counter-Culture: liberty, living for the moment, protecting one's individuality from the common fate of being "crushed and destroyed by a standardized society." Each person's "purpose in life," the codification states, "is to express himself." Cowley wrote that the bohemians saw themselves standing in opposition to "the business-Christian ethic then represented by The Saturday Evening Post," a mainstream valuing "industry, foresight, thrift and personal initiative."

  • The TrendWatch-ing blogs that helped early on had moved on to spotting more upstart brands, with new points of view.

  • "We're independent brands, we did this for a reason, not to be like the establishment brands," he said. "It's, like, what's the purpose? Why'd you start your brand - just to be an Off Shoot of a major company?"

  • "My whole thing now is if you don't Sell Out, you Sell Out on yourself."

  • Rob has a blog with some entries about feedback to it.