Tag Archives: Celebrities

Remaining Unknown in a Viral World: Popularity, ASMR and Celebrity Status

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Earlier today, I was examining the statistics on my website and realized that I have about 1.5 million hits on my site since I started it. That appears to be a lot, but then I started to think to myself that not a lot of people comment on it or send me messages based off of my web site (or its blog). So, this tells me that I seem to get a lot of traffic but apparently nothing seems to be going on with it. And yes, that opens up a lot of thought on a subject I’ll probably take up at another time (what do to with traffic when it gets to your site, as I don’t seem to be doing a whole of good with that area).

Last night, I was watching the latest episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, which is still one of my favorite police procedural types of shows. And in this episode, an Instagram star hooked up with a MMA fighter and was raped, but it turns out the whole thing had been set up by a young woman who was a follower of both of their Instagram feeds. The prosecutor mentioned that a motive for the set up was that the Instgram model had tens of thousands of followers, the MMA fighter had 2 million, and the young, geek girl had 6. Therefore, this was vengeance against the two well known Instagram stars from someone who felt that she had an important voice but no one was listening to her.

That resonated quite a bit with me because I think a lot of us who aren’t big stars often feel the same way. Not that we’re about to set up someone famous like the plot line of this story, but at the same time the realization that there are people who are seriously famous for a sex tape, or for just looking good in pictures, can be a hard thing to face when one is trying really hard to become known as well, but doesn’t  have that advantage those pseudo celebrities have.

Recently, I’ve been following a bunch of ASMR artists who I find to be very good at their craft. In case you’re not familiar with ASMR, it stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, which according to Wikipedia is “is a term used for an experience characterised by a static-like or tingling sensation on the skin that typically begins on the scalp and moves down the back of the neck and upper spine. It has been compared with auditory-tactile synesthesia.” And even with that definition, you’d be amazed (or maybe you wouldn’t) at how many news agencies just don’t understand it, which you can see when they start to make statements that suggest watching President Trump gives “ASMR tingles” or when some celebrity posts a Youtube of her just staring at the screen and the media goes ga ga over her “ASMR video.”

In reality, ASMR is difficult to achieve and very few artists succeed at it. There’s a reason that there are a few very popular ASMR artists out there, and almost none of them are celebrities known for other things.

Which brings me back to my original subject, and that’s that viral popularity has a bad habit of creating an atmosphere that wasn’t intended in the first place. For those not completely familiar with ASMR, it’s pretty easy to fall into the trap of thinking ASMR is nothing but people whispering and making sounds with inanimate objects. And that’s because a lot of it comes from doing exactly that. But it also comes from a stronger understanding of how those actions can trigger the audience into feeling something more than just simple reactions. As a result, quite a few artists sometimes push the envelope and create what I’ve started to characterize as PG-13 ASMR. What I mean by that is ASMR that is designed to arouse rather than “tingle”, and for those not initiated in what ASMR, it can be very easy to mistake one for the other.

This happens quite often because the models who do ASMR are almost always attractive. Both male and female ASMR artists are generally above average in attractiveness and in their social tools for attracting others. This should be expected because this is a video environment where an unattractive artist is going to be avoided or ignored, and an attractive one is going to cause people to click the image being presented on the Youtube reception screen. This often resonates in the comments section of their videos where the anonymous nature of the Internet can cause trolling behavior you’d expect in a darkened strip club environment. To make matters worse, a number of ASMR artists chase the elusive crown of traffic and subscriptions (people subscribe to their personal channels), which leads to a revenue stream from Youtube. This causes the perpetrators of the more adult environment to keep pushing the adult envelope and the non-sexual artists to feel the need to participate because of loss of viewer clicks.

Youtube has somewhat cracked down on this phenomenon, but has done so with broad strokes that hurts mostly the non-sexual artists because they demonetize mostly based on viewer feedback, and the business has become somewhat cutthroat with an almost mob mentality towards those who are actually trying to comply and do the right thing. As usual, those are the ones who suffer the most, whereas the ones who are crossing the line are rewarded because none of their fans are ever going to turn them in for breaking any of the rules.

Which kind of brings me full circle in what I was originally talking about, and that’s the problem of trying to achieve any level of popularity in a bread and circuses environment where controversy, sex and violence are the things that attract the largest audience. How does the unknown artist achieve notoriety in a mostly celebrity driven world? In a free market mentality, one would think that the quality rises to the top and everything else remains at the bottom. But that’s rarely the case. Quite often, celebrity status is more than enough to create buzz so that its products remain at the top and everything else is left grasping for scraps. As a writer, I find this problem emblematic in the field because some really bad celebrity fiction gets serious attention when it’s not very good and it’s written by people who have about twenty years before they’ll actually ever write anything significant (if they were to work on it full time and not just in between movies or photo shoots). But the people who put in the work in hopes of one day becoming discovered may do so their entire lives and never get a nibble beyond a table scrap thrown their way.

So, the question is: Is there a balance, or is it just not worth the effort? I’m kind of on the cusp of this myself, as I’ve been writing for most of my entire life, creating computer games that were popular but too early for the industry to ever recognize, wrote music back in the day when such music was seen as too experimental, and any number of other creative tasks that have fumbled, fizzled or just never took off. People keep saying “Just keep at it and your day will come”, but part of me wonders if it’s just a crap shoot and my time might better be spent catching up on the latest season of The Walking Dead.

Why the Idea of Celebrities on Twitter Drives Me Nuts (and why it should do it to you, too)

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For those who don’t know it, I have a Twitter presence (@duanegundrum). It’s not extremely popular, and I’m lucky if I get a “like” here or there. Mostly, it’s me ranting or making jokes, and no one in the world knowing the difference. As a writer, I have about 5,000 followers. I follow about 500 people. Not great, but not bad either.

At the same time, someone like Kim Kardassian has 54 million followers. She only follows 104 people. Compare that to the most popular writer in the world, Stephen King, who has 3.48 million followers (and follows 63 people). If you go through the lists of really famous people, they tend to have millions of followers and really don’t follow anyone else. In case you haven’t figured it out, they use Twitter as a megaphone, not a tool to communicate with their followers.

When Twitter came about, the idea was that it would be a great place for celebrities to communicate with their fans. But instead of actually “communicate”, they pontificate and there’s little communication that takes place. To make sense of that, you have to understand what communication means to begin with.

Communication, as explained by professors today, involves information exchange between at least two entities. But what’s important about that model is that it’s not just one side speaking to a listener. It’s an exchange of information, so that the receiver then becomes the transmitter and the process continues until the channel is finally closed. In other words, a telephone is used for communicating; a television is not.

When I got involved in Twitter in the early days, I had about 25 followers. They were mainly friends of mine. Over the years, fans and acquaintances joined those numbers, and now I have about 5k, which is a larger number than most people who aren’t straight out celebrities. But part of the “drug” of social media is the desire to constantly improve those numbers so that more people are listening to you or (in my case) having a conversation with you.

There are few people on Twitter I’ve come across who are actual convervationalists. They write stuff, and they respond to stuff. Generally, they have a lot of people who they follow. Others tend to have fewer people they follow but they respond quite often to people who respond to them (which is actually a pretty healthy conversation). George Takei (of Star Trek fame) is one I’d consider in this category (@GeorgeTakei, 2.44 million followers and follows 643 people).

This has often left me wondering how to break into this category of actually making my voice heard. And then I reached a crappy conclusion as an event occurred that I didn’t even realize was happening to me.

I often respond to celebrity posts that are of interest to me, specifically anything that is communication-related, political, or involves writing topics. One pretty famous celebrity (known for his role as one of the current crop of superheroes) posted something about media, and I responded with a Twitter message, basically pointing out how certain messages are put forth by media outlets by using specific phrases, like “some people say”, which is a common vernacular of “Fox News”, brought up often by Jon Stewart of the Daily Show during his years heading that show. The celebrity responded with something like “that’s like what they do on Fox News”, as if it was a new insight. That response received no small number of “likes” from his fan base.

So, since then, I’ve been receiving nonstop “like” notifications of his response while not a single one of them has actually come across from my actual post, meaning that the likes weren’t for the idea but for the fact that someone famous repeated it after me. It’s like the old infamous adage in the science community of how a great idea is irrelevant; communicating it, however, is what’s more important.

So, for all of you out there trying to get your voices heard, this is somewhat of a sobering thought. You can have the greatest ideas and insights that have ever existed, but if you don’t have a megaphone to let anyone know, your idea will never be heard. McLuhan’s idea of “the medium is the message” couldn’t be more significant than today because it may be the only way you will ever be heard. And with all of the noise of Kardassians and reality star driven, your chance of being heard is only going to get that much harder.

 

Is Taylor Swift Finally Achieving Her “Hip to Be Square Moment” of Her Career?

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Maybe she'll write a song about the relationship we never had
Maybe she’ll write a song about the relationship we never had

The other day, I was listening to a song on the radio, and it took me a second to realize it was one of the later Taylor Swift songs (from her 2012 album, Red), called I Knew You Were Trouble. As the song played, it started to dawn on me that I recognized it as a Taylor Swift song not because it was a great song (some of her earlier work has been phenomenal, like Enchanted) but because it had that same “I broke up with some guy and here’s another song about it” feel to it. The song wasn’t all that inspired, and for the first time, I actually found myself thinking, wow, this is the first time I’ve heard a Taylor Swift song that almost feels generically written to be a Taylor Swift song. And that immediately brought up the thought of a song I hadn’t thought about in ages, and that song is “Hip to Be Square” by Huey Lewis and the News. I guess I should sort of explain.

You see, back in 1986, on the album Fore!, Huey Lewis and the News released a song called “Hip to Be Square”. At the time, the group was riding high on its previous success with its album Sports, and it was seen as a continuation of a really strong career that was only going to be getting stronger. When this album was released, I was working for a large San Francisco convention hotel as a middle manager for the Security Department. Because this was a large convention hotel, we often received huge gatherings of hue corporations and industries, and one of them was a massive celebration of national record companies. Being a convention that catered to industry insiders, huge acts performed, and on one evening, the recently VERY successful music group Wilson Phillips was opening for Huey Lewis and the News. Because it occurred at our hotel, I was there that evening supervising Security staff who were there as the outer rim security for the whole performance. Due to circumstances of just chance, my job required me to wear a suit (not a uniform), so to anyone else there, it looked like I was probably one of the industry insiders who was probably part of the running of the show. This was made readily apparent when Chynna Phillips, their lead singer, stepped off stage after her show (and when Huey Lewis and the News was starting) and walked up to me, asking me if I could help her find a restroom. So, I escorted her to the back areas of the hotel, which was the only way to reach a location that I knew other guests wouldn’t be frequenting (which I wanted to avoid as this was basically a music star who could easily get mobbed by a crowd). Strangely enough, she took to me, and actually had a long conversation with me about music (after I stated I was a big fan of her group and felt that they were definitely on their to a great career, as it was very early in their music run), and then we got into a conversation about Huey Lewis and the News, where she stated she was in awe of their group, and for reasons I don’t even know why I shared, I indicated that Huey Lewis and his group was pretty much on its way out to the pasture. I went through a huge analysis of the song Hip to Be Square and how it was so generic that it showed their group basically lost touch with its musical roots and was either going to need to reinvent itself or never be heard from again. It was actually a really cool, long conversation, and when I brought her back to the backstage area after she finished what she needed to do, we parted in a friendly manner, and I cherished my one chance to have a conversation with someone I actually admired.

Shortly after that, Huey Lewis and the News finished their set and rushed off the stage, moving right by me. It seemed the obvious thing for everyone to say “great show” to them as they walked by, but I never forgot the look I got from the main guitarist of the group when I said it. He looked at me like I was some moron for actually complimenting him on a good show. Right then and there, I realized that it wasn’t just the song that I analyzed that was bringing about their demise; the group itself was no longer ingratiating itself towards the fans and actually looked like they were bothered by the fact that they had fans listening to their music. Not surprisingly, they fell into the “where are they now” file of musicians shortly after this industry concert.

This is kind of the feeling I’m getting with Taylor Swift right now as well. When she first made her launch into superstar ranks, there were already smirks about how all of her music is basically about how she can’t seem to hold a relationship. Hell, one of my earlier articles was a joke about how I was worried that I was going to accidentally get into a relationship with Taylor Swift and then discover she wrote about it in a song. I even imagined some of her lyrics:

You always leave the seat up

Never clean the bath tub

And always watch reruns of Star Trek.

Woooooooah!

Strangely enough, it wouldn’t be that much different from what she seems to be doing with most of her current work. I tend to believe that she has reached her “Hip to Be Square” point in her career, and like most groups that fail after this point, she either needs to reinvent herself in a way we haven’t imagined yet (kind of like Madonna did several times to continue remaining relevant), or she’s going to hit that point where people aren’t interested in going over the same sort of thing with each new album. Of course, there are always people who want nostalgia, but unfortunately, you have to put some time in the mix to make that work.

Martha Stewart loses it on Twitter and CNBC thinks it’s a big enough story to do an entire story on it

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This block of wood is more newsworthy than those tweets
This block of wood is more newsworthy than those tweets

The other day, Martha Stewart lost it on Twitter. The upside (or downside) of it is that she dropped her Ipad and then threw a fit because she doesn’t understand how technical support works (in that they usually don’t send someone to your house to fix something you broke, especially when it was given to you for free, even if it was given to you for free by the founder of the company). Basically, the title of the story, if it was worth the time, should have been “Old Female Celebrity Doesn’t Understand How Business Works” or my other favorite: “Old Woman Yells At Kids to Get Off Her Lawn”. Neither is appropriate but they’re probably better than the drama that ensued.

You see, CNBC, and I”m sure many others, seems to think it is a big enough story to have five news pundits sit around a desk and discuss it on national television. Really. 5 of them. What it boils down to is that five highly paid commentators sat around a table and discussed an old woman’s tweets about how she broke her Ipad. We have fewer commentators at one time discussing whether or not the US should get involved in a war in the Middle East. This should tell you what kind of priorities our national news have.

I think that any time a news program starts off a story with a caption showing you what someone tweeted, that station should be taken off the air indefinitely and should be replaced with footage of goldfish swimming in a bowl. Only if the goldfish learn to tweet can the station be allowed to air news again.

I’m just saying….

Problem #77 with Adopting Google+

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I’ve been experimenting with Google+ since it emerged, and as much hype as I read from the major news sites, I just haven’t bought into the propaganda they keep spewing out. I keep reading how Google+ is going to replace Facebook, but no matter how much I look into the service, it fails on almost every level. Let me explain:

1. No one is on it.

Oh, I know how they keep claiming a gazillon people are on it and all that, but I’ll let you in on a little secret (if you haven’t used Google+). No one you know is using it. And that’s the problem right there. Sure, it’s great that Felicia Day (creator of the web episodic show The Guild), Wil Wheaton (the guy who played the kid on Star Trek the Next Generation and has been pulling cameos on other shows like Big Bang Theory and The Guild ever since), and Taylor Swift (the singer) are all on it, but what it’s really turned out to be is a glorified Twitter account where you get to actually see postings of these people, instead of blurts of words from their Twitter feed. But again, so few “normal” people are using it, which means if you want to use it to follow some celebrity with a one-sided conversation (where they never hear from you), then it’s fine. But what makes it different from watching some celebrity gossip show? Nothing, really.

2. The Interface Lacks Substance

Everytime I use Google+, I’m convinced I’m missing something because I go on it and then wonder why I wasted the time. It’s like there’s a whole other big room that’s part of it, but I just haven’t figured out the secret handshake to get into that other room. I suspect that other room doesn’t exist, but even if it does, what good is a service if you can’t access it? That’s my problem with Google+. It has nothing going on for it that keeps me interested. I’m a news junkie, which means I want to see things going on. Right now, my Google+ feed is filled with nonstop cute cat pictures from the celebrities that somehow think this is interesting and relevant. I’m not kidding. The only other type of posting seems to be from April Summers who shows naked pictures of herself in Playboy, which can be cool, but not really newsworthy. Every other person I follow seems to practically repeat the same information but a little bit different each time. The people I’d like to follow and know more about don’t actually have an account, or they have an account and don’t use it (like Taylor Swift).

3. It’s Owned by Google

Google is a great search engine, but honestly it doesn’t really innovate in anything. It does a really good job of seeing what other people do and then streamlines it. But there’s rarely any innovation or brilliant thought behind it. Or when there is, it’s designed by engineers who still haven’t figured out how to communicate with the masses, so they set up really complicated environments and expect the people to figure out how to maneuver through them (“I’m looking at you, Google Adwords!”). And there’s always the fear that Google, in their infinite wisdom, will just cancel your account because you disagreed with something they had to say, or do, cutting off four or five services you might be using that had nothing to do with the reason you got shut off in the first place, and like Facebook, they won’t speak to you in order to fix the situation because you’re irrelevant to them, as you’ve always been.

Why is the News Obsessed with Unimportant, Marginalized People?

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ABC News ran a story today warning informing us that Sarah Palin may in fact be running for president. As a news junkie, my immediate thought wasn’t (to the shock of many) “wow” or “isn’t that interesting” but “who cares?” I mean, honestly, this is such a non-story that the level of ridiculousness borders of a word that would have to be more ridiculous than “ridiculous”. Maybe super-ridiculous. Let’s be honest for a moment here, kids. Sarah Palin has as much of a chance being elected president as I do. Yeah, not kidding here. I have as much chance of being elected president as Sarah Palin does. The only way she would ever be elected president is if 70 percent of the country had a lobotomy the day before the election, which is exactly, not surprisingly, the requirements it would take for the American population to write me in as a write-in candidate in all fifty states, garnering me enough electoral votes to finally call Starving Students to move my furniture into the White House. Then again, with a $400,000 a year salary, I’d probably just leave all my stuff in place and buy all new shit, because I’d definitely be living a completely different life. I’d keep my stuffed animals, and maybe my Playstation 3 (because it gets my streaming Netflix movies, and you know I’d be wanting Netflix in the White House). But the rest of it can go to Good Will, or Good Will Hunting, or wherever it is that you send things when you finally get elected president by a write-in vote because the country has decided it doesn’t want Sarah Palin in the White House.

But I’m starting to digress here. What I really wanted to talk about was Taylor Swift and her new album. Oh wait, that’s not what I wanted to talk about, although I will admit it’s a great album, and I really have enjoyed continuously playing it in my car each and every time I get into it. No, what I wanted to get back to was the subject of how the news seems obsessed with such unimportant stories.

Take Charlie Sheen for instance. Why has the news spent so much time talking about him? Before his ridiculous melt-down, he was really unimportant, insignificant and compartmentalized to a television show that relegated itself to the importance of appearing next to Big Bang Theory. Seriously. And somehow, because he blew up one day, he’s the next most important thing since, well, I don’t have a comparison because it still doesn’t make any sense. Yet, the news, for weeks, was obsessed with all things Charlie Sheen, and honestly, he wasn’t all that significant before it all happened, and now that it’s finally blowing over, I wonder if they’re not all thinking to themselves, “how exactly did that happen?”

Which is what brings me to the obsession itself. Why do they get so obsessed with such unimportant figures in celebrity? We live in an era where people are becoming famous for being famous, and I just don’t understand it. Kim Kardasian recently announced she’s engaged to be married. Who is this person? Why is she a celebrity? Why do we care? Why is she getting so much attention when she hasn’t done a single significant thing ever. Yeah, I understand she was some kind of reality star, but really, is that enough to substantiate all of the attention? Yeah, she’s a bit attractive, but so are a lot of people. They’re not made into media sensations that require booking agents and sit down sessions with David Letterman.

Why aren’t we hyping people for doing great things? That’s one thing I’ve never understood. If a scientist discovers a property that might change humanity and civilization, that person is important and should be considered seriously significant. But rarely is such a person treated that way by anyone outside of his or her scientific discipline or academic community. Instead, we over-hype really ridiculous characters who perform stupid antics, and then make a media career out of that one moment in time.

Could this be a symptom of our need for a 24 hour news cycle, but the reality is that we don’t have 24 hours worth of news to fill that cycle? Is that the problem here? Are we so obsessed with pretending that we have news that we’ll do anything to sell an unimportant story because we don’t want to admit that on a daily basis, nothing really significant tends to happen? Congress can’t come up with a budget. Is that news? Not really. But the day that they do come up with a budget IS news. Then it should be reported. Instead, because we have no news to report, we’ll focus endlesslessy on gridlock as if that’s a story itself. It’s not. Gridlock means you can’t make a decision, or a consensus of a decision. Try to sell that as a story, and you start to see the problem that we seem to be experiencing in our daily lives. We have nothing to report, so we report unimportant events as “events” and then we hype the hell out of them until the rest of us suddenly feel it’s important.

So, what’s our solution? Stop paying attention. Really. That’s it. Discontinue watching news that hypes stupid shit as actual news. It may mean looking for alernative avenues of news because the old avenues don’t know how to stop hyping crap as news. However, I suspect that most of us are addicted to this crap, so we’re kind of doomed to a continuous process of receiving fake news as news, and our attention will continue to be focused on unimportant people doing unimportant things while the rest of us are told to treat it as important. Mainly because we don’t have any other way of looking at the situation.

The Fascination With Celebrities

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I was reading a “top 50 reasons why you should be proud of living in New York City” and one of them had something to do with rubbing shoulders with famous people. First, I don’t live in New York City, and second, I’ve never understood the fascination with celebrities people have. I can understand liking someone because that person is a talented musician, actor, or whatever, but why care anything about their personal life? If Angelina Jolie is dating someone, who cares? It’s not like she’s going to be dating me, or anyone I know anytime soon, so why should I care? Why does anyone care?

I’ve always wondered about this focus people have on the lives of famous people. In the last decade or so, we’ve actually moved from a fascination with celebrities to a ridiculous amount of attention on non-celebrities who want to be celebrities and have become celebrities as a result. That, in itself, borders on complete insanity.

The fact is, the few times that I’ve actually hobnobbed with actual celebrities, I’ve discovered I really didn’t like them. Or they were so normal that they weren’t really all that much of celebrities to me. Yet, there is an entire industry that is fueled on this obsession with famous people.

I really don’t understand it.

Writing is SO Easy that ANYBODY can do it…apparently

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Turns out that reality (not so much of a) star Heidi Montag has announced that she is “writing a movie”. Really? It’s that easy? Does she even know how to read?

This is one of those things that really bugs me about people who don’t write. They seem to believe it’s SO easy. For those of us who are actually writers, it tends to really piss us off that someone who is a celebrity for no real reason other than that she has had too many boob jobs, is convinced that she’s now going to pen a GREAT script for a movie. The incredulous part that stems up is mainly attributed to the very nature of stating she’s “writing a movie”. Who says that? Does she even know there’s a script involved?

Bah, this sort of thing really bugs me. Here’s the article.