Microcelebrity and Frienemies
If you used AOL in the early 90s, you likely remember Courtney Love going nuts on the music message boards. She’d stop in every few months and leave a whirlwind of mostly incoherent posts — sometimes something about Mary Lou Lord and oral sex and Kurt and a van after a show and how it is all NOT TRUE, sometimes just her daily gripes (”I am thinking heavily of trying Prozac…. I would appreciate info from intense, passionate, sexual (hetero, generally) and esp. CREATIVE females regarding this drug__I’m NOT clinically depressed__I’m not even manic-depressive, just super neurotic and paranoid….”) — whatever it was, she always sounded defensive. From an article written around that time:
“It’s like a masturbatory videogame all about me!” Courtney Love brags over the phone, only halfself-mockingly. Love first stormed onto America Online in the spring of ‘94, not long after her husband took a shotgun to his head and changed her life forever. Her first mission: to intercept her estranged father, Hank Harrison, who had been on the service promoting a very unauthorized Kurt Cobain biography he was writing. In an online battle in full view of AOL’s thenthree million users, “hunnypi 28″ accused “BioDad” of exploiting the tragedy. BioDad eventually vanished back into anonymity. Love decided to stick around.
“For a while I was really addicted to it,” she says now. “It was like my only friend. I just couldn’t deal with humans__I was dealing with these cyberbeings, and having these inane conversations, banal conversations, crazy conversations, dealing-with-grief conversations with people from fucking God-knows-where who looked like God-knows-what.”
But she wasn’t treated with adoration at all. Love was entangled in major drawn out online feuds, at a time when everyone hid behind anonymous “handles.” Part of it was to accuse her of killing Kurt, partly a reaction to her paranoid writing style, but I think most of the people coming at her, just wanted to get her attention.
Online, Courtney Love was a pinata, but most of these people were just random suburban teenagers who would inevitably act obsequiously given a backstage pass to meet her. Because they were — kinda — her fans. She still blogs, but has, as far as I know, kept out of online discussions.
There is one case when the rage toward a public figure is genuine: when it is not really the public figure, but someone posing as him. Look at Richard Dawkins on Twitter. Some hater registered the account and used the opportunity to eventually tell his fans how Dawkins is wrong. Following that, he got a number of flaming replies.
Now, anyone who paid attention from the beginning would have noticed it couldn’t possibly be Dawkins. But no one on the internet bothers investing the time to even read a sentence from somebody seemingly important, unless it directly matters to them. You just add “Richard Dawkins” to your Twitter feed cause you know he’s smart and you’d like to read his stuff one day and maybe that passive-contact will make you smarter by osmosis.
AOL users never doubted Courtney Love’s posts were fake. It had to be her. The way she wrote was so uniquely strange. It was a nervous breakdown reduced to online text. It was great!
I was reminded of Courtney Love, reading Keith Gessen’s blog. Not in terms of content, but the reactions he’s received. He made some comment about “Taking back the internet,” and a blog appeared using that name:
Last week, when Gawker linked to this blog, I took some solace in the fact that I suddenly had a slew of tumblr followers. My followers, I thought, would follow me to the ends of the earth.
But now I’ve clicked on some of your tumblrs, and it turns out you all hate me.
Will I ever forget the moment I discovered “takebacktheinternet.tumblr” in my followers? “Ah!” I thought. “A fan site.”
It was not a fan site.
So, without further ado, I’ve decided to take the initiative and buy up all the potential tumblrs my less than enthusiastic followers might be inclined to one day occupy. These are:
keithgessensucks.tumblr.com
keithgessensucksballs.tumblr.com
istuckmyballsinkeithgessen’sear.tumblr.com
istuckmyballsinkeithgessen’searandcalledhimnames.tumblr.com
istuckmyballsinkeithgessen’searandcalledhimnamesinthegawker
commentssection.tumblr.com
ididn’tevenstickmyballsinkeithgessen’searbecausei’veneverhe
ardofhimandhesucks.tumblr.comI think that about covers it. Now what you gonna do?
See that’s kind of funny. Maybe he’s not conceited, like everyone thought. And he’s writing it on a Tumblr — the least pretentious blog software one could use. But the criticism kept coming, playful jabs at his alleged inflated sense of entitlement (here and here and here.)
It’s a perpetuation of previous aggression and the capacity to get attention from someone who is in the public eye. Criticism is always easier to write than praise. But the haters don’t really hate him. At least, not the way I hate Chris Matthews or Londoners hate Boris Johnson. They may resent his success. They might find something about him annoying. But the premise of the annoyance — that Gessen takes himself too seriously — was proven wrong as soon as he set up a Tumblr. Now he’s having a party, inviting the very people behind the mocking websites.
Attention is attention whether its praise or venom. As Rex Sorgatz writes in his New York magazine article on how to attain microcelebrity:
If there is a Latin phrase for “reply to everything,” it should be crocheted on your pillows and tacked above your door. Anytime your name is used, you are required to e-mail, comment, or firebomb the person invoking it. When in doubt, remember these three maxims: There is no such thing as being above the fray, every battle is worth fighting, and all disputes are good press.
Tao Lin gets it. He offered free copies of his books to “shit talkers,” anyone who can produce evidence “that you don’t like me (a link to something you typed on the internet or a description of what you said to someone about me).”
McLuhen didn’t predict a medium that keeps you busy every minute of the day — even when you are doing nothing. There is always another thing to “Read Later” or email or blog or cut+paste, or skim rather than read. Time and attention are spread too thin. People are too busy to decide whether they like something or not, the Internet makes everything a joke.
What was the last thing on the Internet you concentrated on for longer than a minute? What got a strong reaction from you? Besides this photo of Ryan Gosling and this video from a My Bloody Valentine concert, just about everything I see online is encoded in my mind as a murky grey shade. And it isn’t often retrieved after I close my laptop for the day. I have no idea what I looked at thirty minutes ago. I could take or leave it, but I can’t tear myself away from looking, when I’m in the middle of it.
And that gets to an idea I have, which is going to be an upcoming post: why everything on the internet goes back to sex. Porn is the one thing that consistently holds one’s attention online (And if you can’t concentrate on that, man, maybe you really should consider visiting those Chinese rehab clinics.)
Another good point from Sorgatz’s piece:
Where traditional fame was steeped in class envy on the part of the audience and alienation on the part of the celebrity, microfame closes the gap between devotee and celebrity. It feels like a step toward equality. You can become Facebook friends with the microfamous; you can start IM sessions with them. You can love them and hate them at much closer proximity. And you can just as easily begin to cultivate your own set of admirers. Though an element of luck often plays a role in achieving traditional fame, microfame is practically a science. It is attainable like running a marathon or acing the LSAT. All you need is a road map.
This is important because for most creative types, microcelebrity is all you can dream to achieve. Sorgatz points out Tila Tequila only sold 13,000 copies of her album. But that’s the average for a Pitchfork-approved musician. An author under contract with a major publishing house might sell twice as many books. Microfame is inevitable for most authors and musicians, regardless of their web participation. And money plays a part in this. Someone can be extremely well known and just never manage to profit from it. When you hear about an author earning six figure advance for a novel, it might seem like they’ve entered a tax bracket above your own. But not really. If that book took two or three years to write (as it very well should have!) the advance isn’t as impressive.
How can you pretend to have any power over your fanbase when they earn twice as much as you did, working as administrative assistants? If you want to be a public figure in these times, you can’t play boss.
Images of male celebrities crying by Sam Taylor-Wood, courtesy of Arab Aquarius.
Previously:
- The President Isn’t Your Boss
- We Live in Public
- Will Kindle Save “Hypertext” Fiction?
- More tagged “web history“
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