Edited by author 07-08-2002 01:52 PM
I'm seeking some input for a potential story. Why hasn't the Internet made more people famous? The number of people who have entered the pop-culture mainstream purely as a result of their Internet activities is very small. There's Mahir, Drudge and... anyone else? Why does Internet "stardom" so rarely cross over into mass-market popularity? Post your thoughts here or send me an e-mail. I'll ask before quoting anyone. Thanks! --David

(7/8/02 update: The story I was planning to write turned into this story about Mahir. Background info here.)

Hi. I don't really have any input toward answering your main question, but I wanted to mention someone else who has achieved their "fame" through their internet activities: Harry Knowles of Austin-based Ain't It Cool News (http://aint-it-cool-news.com). Somehow he gained influence in Hollywood as an amateur gossip-monger, for better or worse.

The Web hasn't built a system to mass produce stardom yet, which is what the music and film industries are. Sony, Viacom, and AOL/TW spend billions of dollars promoting actors and singers through conduits like Entertainment Weekly and MTV, but the Web doesn't have anything like that. The only star-building infrastructure the Web has is a loose network of chat rooms, message boards, weblogs, and communities that operate on word-of-mouth.

The net also is very new compared to TV, radio/music, and film. Those who know the "stars of the web" are folks who are on this beast 24/7, and read about the latest craze via email from chums, and what jkottke mentioned already.

It's also interesting that it's not necessarily an individual that becomes "famous" via the net, but it's the website itself that has fame attached to it. These famous sites can also carry the "15 minute / MC Hammer" status, as well. I'm sure you remember Hampster Dance and that All Your Base Are Belong To Us site...
 
I figure, just give it a couple years for speeds to catch up and then the merger of video/film & music will come more into play on the web. Until then, we can only hope and wait to see Jkottke star in "The Blogger: Triumph Over Thought" ;)

I think jkottke and cherz have the right idea. I would add that reasons for what they've cited may be the relative anonymity of the web. You may have a sense of a person's personality from reading their website and you may know their name, but you're probably less likely to recognize them in public like you would a movie, tv, or music star, even if they do have plenty of photos of themseleves plastered all over the net. it's probably easier to parallel a web personality with a director... someone behind the scenes.

Fame is all about scarcity of information. The less I know about Jack Nicholson, the more I can fill in all the pieces of what I think he's like, and the more I like him. But the web is all about too much information. Wanna know about me? One Google search and you'll have enough info to ruin your whole day - and turn me from a famous person into a real person.

The web is bad for fame ... and that's why I like it.

Edited by author 03-18-2002 11:46 PM
Two factors that contribute are the narrowcast topic-based format of the net and the lack of video. Not enough people 'tune in' to one particular personality on a consistent basis. There is no Cronkite of the net and Ananova has no personality. On the net we don't collect around personalities and media sources as much as ideas and memes. It takes too long to get to know a person because the net deprives most people the sound and vision needed to assess individual character and style. Stardom on the net is specialized because the audience that creates the 'famous' is able to focus attention much more tightly than the standard 200 channels. Every point on the Dewey Decimal system has its Kottke, and it's this wide distribution that prevents critical mass crossover. Porn stars and online game characters are likely to break out first. But porn stars don't get famous for their depth of personality and game characters have no depth at all in real life. Maybe we should just stick with ideas and memes.

Christopher C Anderson
<my initials>net@att.net

"Fame, puts you there where things are hollow" - Bowie

Well ... as far as I can tell, no diary or annotated reading list has ever, in the history of the world, made anyone famous. Perhaps famous posthumously--but only if you're of Pepys' or Anne Frank's calibre, say. And these things make up the bulk of (personal) web content.

Generally you need to *do* something to become famous, like sing or act or write or govern or do prize-winning research. (Which Drudge does, of course. Mahir is famous for being a goose.) Famous people aren't famous for purely arbitrary reasons.

Derek: Jack Nicholson's famous because there's a scarcity of information about him? And my grandmother? I don't understand your argument.

Jason: are you saying that famous people (Britney Spears?) become famous through the marketing efforts of large corporations? I do agree that marketing helps, and that no corporation is going to promote a would-be famous internet person because there's no money in it. I'm arguing, though, that for the most part, nothing on the internet is of interest to more than a few thousand people. There's nothing here worth marketing in the first place.

This doesn't mean that I don't love the internet, that I don't love the people I've met via the internet, and that I don't appreciate the interactions made possible by the internet. It does mean that I think questions like "why hasn't the internet made more people famous?" as silly. If you can be famous on the web, you can be famous elsewhere. There's no talent exclusive to the web that doesn't translate into the non-web world.

--Michael

Edited by author 03-19-2002 08:35 AM
As Stillwell says, no diary or annotated reading list ... and in the U.S. I don't know if you could even name anyone who got famous-as-you-define it solely due to magazines (perhaps Tina Brown). Currently the Web is a lot of writing. Perhaps there are some stories soon to come of the next South Park creators that get their start due to the Web.
   Amongst people who read, the Onion is much better known than it would be if it had remained paper-only. And Google is "famous" for its usefulness, but I'm sure that's not what you mean.

There are also the Internet-celebs like Jeff Bezos, who's certainly famous because of the Internet. At first, I'd assumed I could think of others like Bezos, but he's really one of the only biz-oriented net-celebs who's been clever enough to use other media to promote himself.

I mean, there are "famous" people on the web: Dave Winer of UserLand for one. But who outside the web knows about them?

It's true that the web hasn't been that good at producing (or even enhancing) "off-line" celebrities.

First of all, I would have to ask you to define exactly what "fame" is. Is it money? Notoriety? Tons of hot babes? There are plenty of people I would consider "famous" on the Internet today. The question is, are they getting filthy rich from what they're doing...probably not. One weakness of the Internet even today is, that not everyone uses it. Many "average" users are only using the Internet to find cheap plane tickets and get email.

What about the X-10 ads? Everyone has seen one of those at one time or another. Are they famous (infamous?) Take for instance Dell computer. What if they had instead chose to advertise Ben Curtis (Steven) in a pop-up ad that said "Dude, you're getting a Dell" every time it opened instead of the commercials on TV. Would he be as famous as he is now...I doubt it.

On the other hand, there are many things on the web that (I don't think) would transfer into the real-world as well as the on the web. Take for example Sam Brown's explodingdog. One difference on the web is that much of the content is written in first person. By the author, about the author. Not by a team of writers developing what the character should be.

one thing to remember, of course, is that it's pretty hard for TV/movie/music personalities to get "famous" these days too, in the sense that millions of people can recognize them even if they aren't directly familiar with their work. given that, i'd say that Marc Andreesen, for a time anyway, was at least as famous as, say, the second male lead on a non-hit network sitcom. Similarly, well-endowed flauntrepreneur Danni Ashe has to be at least as famous as any of Pam Anderson's cohorts on "VIP." Throw in Harry Knowles too, who somebody already mentioned earlier -- aside from Roger Ebert and the guy who replaced Siskel, Knowles is probably the world's most well-recognized movie critic. and also there's Napster's Shawn Fanning, who while all but forgotten now, was a pretty ubiquitous media presence in 2000. And below the level of these examples, there's probably dozens, if not hundreds, of people (Jay Stile, Rob Malda, Drew Curtis, Wil Wheaton, Jennifer Ringley, etc.) who have the same kind of fame as the lead singer of a band like Modest Mouse has -- to the niche audiences that develop around them, they're definitely "famous." To everyone else, they're fairly anonymous. It is interesting, though, that the mass-market websites that attract enough traffic to actually make someone famous to millions of people haven't made more of an effort to develop/promote homegrown Internet celebrities who actually do whatever they do on the Internet...

one must do something that is picked up on the radar of the mass marketing machine that jkottke mentioned. and on the web, the most complicated it gets is a 5 minute star wars parody. a web log or a photo gallery is easy, and people off their ideas in these formats every day instead of combining them into larger, more interesting pieces like novels or films or albums or _____. and as the means of production become more and more accessible, well, what was once easy or simple can become thoughtless. it ain't enough to market. not to dismiss the personal stories and all, there is a value in that, but i don't think we're gonna sell collections of links and thoughts on those links

Thanks for all the great posts. I'm not sure Bezos and Andreesen really count in my mind. I'm talking about people who, taking advantage of the supposed level playing field of the net, used it to get their writing or music or whatever out there, and moved on to household-name status. This was the original promise of MP3.com -- it was supposed to let unsigned bands bypass the record label machinery and reach the masses. I don't think any of them really did. Harry Knowles is a good example, but he's not quite a household name -- probably 1/25 as big a name as Ebert. I agree that the Web's architecture encourages microniches, which discourages stardom, so it's the opposite of Hollywood. And I like the point about the lack of video. If everyone gets broadband, and it becomes cheap to post video, will that change things? Another question: How do you account for the exceptions, like Drudge, Mahir, Knowles, Danni Ashe?

Currently there is no Web site that offers enough of an advantage over traditional methods.

There aren't any sites that have the "right people" reading them (a few have tried this, like iam.com [which folded last year] and http://www.musician.com/mcom/).

Let's say I made a feature film. Why would I choose the Web over submitting to festivals and smaller studios? Sure I might make a site to promote it and offer downloads, but the gatekeepers don't visit those sites.

I think what's more important is that the cost of production is coming down. I can make films or record an album now without dishing out as much cash. That may get me noticed. Or once I've been noticed and have an audience/fanbase, I could do it Prince-style and use this stuff to be independent.

Above all else, anything that makes a lot of money for mostly white, privileged folk isn't going to change.

Michael: What I mean is this: Show me where I can read Jack Nicholson's journal online. Show me where I can read what he thinks of the new iMac, or what he had for lunch.

It seems to me that scarcity of information is a central ingredient in the fame recipe. That's why famous people pay publicists to control the flow and spin of the personal information that gets out. The less information you have about a famous person, the more you can like them, because reality doesn't interfere with the fantasy.

That's why I think the internet is bad for traditional fame. Here you can find out so much about someone, it kills all the mystery. It's almost as if, as soon as you put up that personal journal, you're guaranteeing that you'll *never* be famous.

Singular and huge fame like we've seen on in pop culture is a result of the medium - TV, radio, print. The web doesn't work that way - we're not all watching the same thing at once.

When you are dealing with few-to-many medium (TV, radio, print), you get a few people known by many: fame.

When you are dealing with a many-to-many medium (the web), you get smaller groups of people who are known by eachother.

Andy Dehnart wrote an excellent piece on fame online for the Chicago Tribune a few months back. He's reprinted it on his website: http://www.andydehnart.com/media/words/ess...ry.shtml?onlinefame

Edited by author 03-20-2002 12:11 PM
I'm not a big fan of any of them, but AFAIK Linkin Park, Alien Ant Farm, and Drowning Pool all got their break because of their immense online popularity.

TV/Movie celebrities tend to be born of a culture that is very unlike the web culture a lot of us have grown to know. That is to say, in a passive medium like tv, we are force fed our celebrities. In an interactive, many to many medium like the web, we choose those who represent and interest us.


With the web, you can afford to be specific. You don't have to be the everyman. But, being the everyman, while offering new and exciting (read: exclusive) things on the web will get you noticed in the mainstream.

Mahir: Everyone identified with his vulnerability and desire to be loved. His accidental celebrity was too good a press story too miss.

Danni Ashe: Very simply one of the first online porn folks to personally identify with her audience. Very exclusive at the time, and well, porn is universal. The combination of the two made for a b-level, underground celeb

Knowles: Loud mouthed and brash, Knowles really hit on one of the web's best uses: Trading insider information and trashing famous people. Also, this amount of inside information scared traditional media, thus ensuring coverage.

Drudge: Well, when you have exclusive information on the celebrities/politicians people love/hate, you're going to garner a small amount of fame. I wouldn't say he's more famous than a syndicated gossip columnist though.

That's my two cents. josh

Edited by author 03-20-2002 04:28 PM
It's difficult to compare having a famous presence on the internet to having a famous presence in other forms of media; the ratio of viewers to content sources is very low online, and very high for TV & movies. Even with hundreds of TV channels, there are still millions of TV viewers; people & ideas are funnelled down into a very small space which attracts many people simultaneously. The internetizens who we'd consider famous became so only because of media crossover (Mahir being interviewed for magazines, TV, etc.), becoming introduced into the many-to-one media market.

On the internet, there are almost as many websites as there are people online; I know it's somewhat of an exaggeration, but the numbers are closer in that respect than in the other media that's being compared. There's no way to have the internet's focus put directly on yourself, unless you're lucky enough to have many major websites link to you simultaneously, and even then your link will slowly fall off the radar as new links are found. Nobody gets their website viewed by millions every single week for 5 years, while sitcom actors are paid big bucks to have that sort of attention. If you're lucky, a website develops a crew of devoted fans, but because there's so MUCH out there it's not possible to have constant and massive attention over the internet.

(oops -- I'm not Powazek; I'm a different Derek. Sorry for any confusion :)

Derek P: I'm not sure I agree with you on Nicholson etc. People build huge Web shrines to record every scrap of info on their favorite celebrities, and fans eat this stuff up. I think this ends up strengthening their fame, not hurting it, no?

The other Derek: Yes, media crossover is key here. Why hasn't there been more of it? There is so much creative output on the Web right now. Why didn't someone post such a moving essay on 9/11 that they ended up getting invited to the White House and signing a huge book deal? Why hasn't one of those thousands of unsigned bands started a huge sensation with an MP3 file and ended up in the top ten? Is the power of online word of mouth really that puny relative to the power of corporate marketing? Yes, the sheer quantity of info makes it hard to find good things, but it also means there's got to be some good things out there to be found.

I think the problem is that the web still has little real mass-market coverage/awareness. I wouldn't even say someone like Danni Ashe or Drudge are someone that if I asked 10 people on the street, whether 1 or 2 might have heard of.

When the other media do look at the web, it's still seeing the web as a hodge-podge of novelties and personalities. And in most cases, this media is either directed at or consumed by "the converted" (people already in the loop.

The web is a wide-open space for anyone to do anything, but it's an amazingly closed world still, because it's still so unknown to those outside of it.

In addition, various elements of the web allow for a situation where one can get caught in (at least) two traps:

1) The time-warp: things don't always die on the web, they just sort of grow old and moldy making it virtually impossible for someone who logs on to the web today for the first time to know that Site X or Personality Y actually dates back to a phenomena of 3-4 years ago, rather than something new. So Site X and Personality Y will become "new" again and again to a new group of people with their popularity perhaps widening in scope but never really developing or growing in depth.

2) The self-referential loop: people tend to link to the same people who link to the same people and so people go 'round and 'round in this circle thinking that's as large as the web gets.

Edited by author 03-20-2002 06:54 PM
Don't mind my ramblings, but why should fame be an issue for netizens? Part of the internet's benefit is that a viewer can also be a participant, and early on most things like IRC, MUD, Usenet, email, etc were popular because everyone was on the same level. With the coming of the WWW, things started to move towards viewer/viewee. Dividing up people into the 'famous'/'not famous' classes may diminish the value of the internet.

On a different topic: like jkottke said below, there doesn't seem to be a meta-mass-media like Entertainment Tonight singling out the internet-stars and packaging little stories about them. The internet IS the meta-mass-media, with fan-sites, weblogs, IRC, email newsletters, etc. How many writers for People Magazine, Seventeen, Entertainment Tonight, etc, do you know? Readers are attracted to People magazine & Entertainment Tonight for the content, not because the content creators are famous. kottke.org becomes famous because it's a repository for links & info, not because Jason Kottke has ever done anything fame-worthy (what HAS Jason Kottke done besides his website, anyways? :) j/k). Kottke as 5,000 sites linking to his (according to Google) because his site is a place to find out information about content set up for entertainment. Even his oft-mentioned 9/11 entry was mostly a collection of links to other sites.

For fame to occur online, there probably has to be someone who regularly creates their own original content, recieving mass discussion on the 'blogs & other central sites. It seems the people who have been getting attention (like Stile or AICN or Drudge, and most of the others listed here) are just commenting on other things, rather than creating things themselves. Maybe the reason that musicians & writers online (or even oddities like Emotion Eric or Robot Frank) don't have more fame is that there aren't enough kottke's writing about them.

The attraction to weird news articles seems to me the bulk of most blog's contents, and things move so fast online that once a few sites write about Emotion Eric, it's left in the dust and quickly becomes old news. Actors & Musicians are always putting out new albums, performing new roles, etc. There isn't much of that online.

Sidethought: Famous people in traditional media have media engines behind them, and they have a large support system which keeps them moving, creating new things, writing new scripts, performing new songs, etc. The people we think of as famous online just create things themselves, and publish on their own. If you're an actor and you start getting famous, you have an agent who'll keep you creating new things, hooking you up with other directors & writers who want you to continue be famous so that they succeed in their jobs. Famous people are the pinnacle of a bunch of other people's work. There's not that kind of structure online - everyone is on their own, creating their one or two interesting things, and if they get noticed, they get noticed. If you're OddTodd, what do you do next? I don't mean give ongoing interviews talking about oddtodd.com; I mean, what's the next thing he creates to keep the fame moving? If you've written a dozen songs and put them online, and one got a bunch of downloads, how do you funnel that interest into downloading the next songs you write? To address a previous reference; Jack Nicholson isn't famous today because of his role in the Shining -- while a great role, Jack has progressed, with new roles & new projects and new art being created over the decades. If anything, wilwheaton.net isn't famous because of Wil Wheaton - it's just another step in his much-larger fame, the fame of Wil Wheaton. If all he did was wilwheaton.net, despite his history as an actor, there'd be stagnation and he'd cease being famous.


Phew; blah, blah, blah, blah....after re-reading my ramblings, I considered deleting it all, but I think the original post was asking for brainstorming ideas, so I'll leave it as is.



(grrr...and I promised myself I would change my name this time yet forgot, but again I'm not Powazek. I should make a t-shirt that says that. That'd rock. Meta-reference to a media icon in the meta-mass-media environment.)

Why hasn't the internet made anyone famous? I think one obvious reason is that as wide-spread as the internet is, it's not yet ubiquitous enough to garner the mass appeal needed to produce an internet version of Brad Pitt, if you will.

Most bloggers would settle for being perceived as the "Dick Cavett" of the internet, but that hasn't yet emerged either. Why?

Because secretly, people don't like bloggers. (Of course, I think Hunkabutta and its author are great.) However, bloggers are, for the most part, self-serving ego-filled individuals that get joy from trying to show the world how many clever thoughts they can have in one day. The small portion of the public that is exposed to blogging, is savvy enough to realize this. Bloggers and other internet personalities simply don't exhibit enough raw talent to break the barriers of the Internet. And that's the key, isn't it? Are you talented and respected enough to be appreciated in more than one form of media? Obviously, some internet personalities have a great deal of talent, but try as hard as they might, fame still demands paying one's dues, struggle, pain, and a whopping amount of luck. If your talents can't survive outside the confines of the internet, then it stands to reason you'll never be a star.

People with the talent, the motiviation, and the ability to succeed to the extent that they are perceived as being "famous", fight their fight on many fronts - not just the internet.

What about justin at links.net?

Justin's site and his writing is great. He's definitely a pioneering blogger. It's just that it's so obvious that he impresses himself to no end with his own cleverness. And, I think, careful study of his site reveals that he gets easily threatened by anyone smarter or more clever. He seems like a bit of a snob to boot. All of that combined, is a little alienating. Then again, who the hell am I to judge?

Justin is way ahead of most because he realizes that technology *can* mix with art and fashion in a culturally significant way. And I think he visualizes this idea in a way most can't or won't. Unfortunately, he hasn't been able to develop a thesis from all of this, so he tries to use silly anecdotes about popping zits and penis diseases to fill in the blanks.

I don't mean to pick on Justin. It's just that he's a perfect case in point as to why I don't think most bloggers will become famous. The general public (mostly women) just wouldn't like J-dog.

I suspect though, that Justin just needs a good agent, a good venue, and perhaps some kind of profound life experience that will snap him out of his self-centered views. Irony suggests that the minute Justin stops wanting attention, his dreams of fame might come true.

Currently he's stuck in a rut; addicted to ego-stroking from Japanese people. He'll snap out of it though.

I'd like to try and temper my last post about Justin. It was incredibly judgemental. He is a growing creative force, regardless of what I say. Check him out