Topic B, Part 5: I Am What I Am Not

The internet combines two worlds in a way that no medium has ever done before – it provides the mob mentality of the congregated masses as well as the safety and anonymity of solitude. The result is the freedom to (re)construct identity and to perfect the art of (self-) promotion. It is both a communal and a personal forum; it operates much like a real marketplace or town square, given equally to exhibition and commerce. But imagine a marketplace that allows its participants as much or as little secrecy and obscurity as they wish. Accordingly, what we’re selling in this marketplace, as often as not, is a heavily modified version of ourselves.

The real coup represented by someone like Jeffree Star is the willingness to step into the actual world while maintaining that myspace-crafted persona. We have come to expect a degree of falsification and misrepresentation online, but still hold higher standards for authenticity in the flesh & blood, bricks & mortar world. The fabricated world of online creation should be negated by the actual world of lived experience – you are not your facebook profile; you do not look like your carefully chosen and posted photos - but when a Jeffree Star comes along and denies this rift, it raises alarm. And I think that, as PF suggested, is the point of the whole exercise. New modes of self-invention; newly available methods of self-definition.

Star is but one example of the new breed who, by cunningly utilizing the tools granted them by history’s greatest shared source of information, have become “famous for being famous,” or more accurately, famous simply because they claim to be famous.

***UPDATE*** Emily Nussbaum suggests that maybe it's a generational gap, that nobody over 30 can possibly understand what it means to be young and alive and online today. Most chilling passage? That would have to be this one:

Younger people, one could point out, are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.

Topic B, Part 4: Amplify the lie.

This whole fake it 'til you make it attitude must occur on such a grand scale in the entertainment industry (or at least the industry of entertainment wannabes). It's like padding your resume -- times a thousand! The practice must be much more common and accepted in showbiz than it is in the workaday world, though it's probably done just as surreptitiously.

One could argue that Jeffree Star has every right to manufacture his persona, and that he even has the right to create a biography out of whole cloth, since the business he's in is fuelled by illusion. Why should the development of an alter ego stop at stage names?

An artist's authenticity always amazes (ah! alliteration), but sometimes we need a little fantasy, no? As PF pointed out, the reality might actually disappoint.

Hmm. Maybe I shouldn't be so hard on Laura Albert.

topic b, part 3: the prettiest (proto)star

wow - i just came across this article and thought it fit in perfectly with our recent thoughts.

i'm curious about how real any of it is, though. clearly, mr. star is connected enough to make myspace demos with peaches' drummer (although, i can't honestly say how connected that really makes a person), and he's great at doing the self-promotion qualified by noncommittal disclaimers thing (ie, a makeup line that's "secretly in the works, but you can publish that" and a reality tv show that "is getting finalized today").

i'm impressed by the fake it 'til you make it chutzpah on display here. so impressed, in fact, that i can't tell if i'd really just rather it all remain a cloud of hyperbole awaiting media "condensation" (like a molecular cloud coalescing in the interstellar medium! if i may belabor the metaphor just a tad more - pardon that, but it has the word "medium" built right into it!).

that's the real art happening here, and i'm sure any "realization" of the alleged works in progress henceforth would be a bit of a letdown.

Topic B, Part 2: Infected

Ah yes, viral marketing, wherein the advertisers, having cottoned on to the fact that by and large we don't like to be sold to, try to fool us into thinking we're not being sold to, but that lwnmwrboy1980 from Des Moines just really loves Zowie Cola, and wants you to know about it. It's gotten so that I distrust just about any viral video I see - there are just too many fakes. A strange about-face, when you think about it: now that we all own the technology on our desktops to make near-Hollywood quality video, the marketing people are trying to make their product look as lo-fi and accidental as possible. It confounds the notion of authenticity. Makes the head spin.

Topic B, Part 1: You got served.

Betagal and PF bring up an interesting point: the idea of manipulation. This isn't just restricted to wigged-out brides on YouTube (please excuse the hair-related pun); remember lonelygirl15? JT LeRoy? Most exposed pranks are justified as performance art or even social experiments, but those who were fooled tend to get really, really angry about the grift. They write books about it! They make widely ignored movies about those books!

So should staged clips be labelled as such? I'd like to think that I'm savvy enough to distinguish real footage from the scripted variety, or at least take it all with a grain of salt (if that expression applies), but what if the clip involved a crime? (Imagine, /a, if we had posted a clip of one of the fake kidnappings we pulled off in high school? Would the act be dismissed as low-brow entertainment, or would we have police knocking on our doors?)

If I saw footage of a crime on YouTube, my first instinct would be to assume that it was a prank. Who'd post that sort of thing on YouTube, of all places, right? Yet the site has been used to nab murder suspects and is being used to find missing persons. Will the proliferance of Internet hoaxes (and punking in general) diminish the effectiveness of measures like these, because the fakes create a "crying wolf" atmosphere in which the real victims are lost?