Celebritization and Resistance (26 May 2011)

As I inevitably tend to view social media through the lens of my personal experience, I tend to degender it and talk about it in the asexual terms of corporate branding, with adults pursuing their attentional accumulation and personal affirmations like canny entrepreneurs, deploying a kind of abstracted informational commodity in tweets and updates and links and so on. But clearly the imperative of self-exploitation strikes us all unevenly, and it's conditioned by gender and race and class and social capital and innumerable other things that would be impossible to totalize. Because they quantify attention, social media can make it seem as though it is an abstract commodity, like money, uniform and commensurate, but that masks the the fact the different forms of attention available have different consequences for subjectivity. It's one thing to have, say, your blog post on Spinoza tweeted; quite another to have your picture reblogged on Fuck Yeah Self-Shooters. And it is not as though the sort of attention we can seek is some entirely autonomous choice. What is available, or what we know is possible or attainable, is highly conditioned by where we are already situated.

If there is any commonality among the various snares of the attention economy, it may be in an underlying reflexivity, an awareness of identity as an alienated thing rather than a lived-in spontaneity. Reflexivity introduces absence into any sense of presence, an awareness of audiences not directly accounted for which nonetheless must be played to. Still, the different ways in which we are enticed to seek attention, the different audiences we are brought to suspect are in our reach, require different forms of resistance, different precommitments perhaps. So while I feel myself being sucked into a personal-branding spiral; women face a temptation to sexualized modes of attention-seeking that I don't experience.

So the online objectification and fetishization of young women, the generalized idea of their availability, drives a disproportionate slice of the online attention economy, authenticating a certain kind of attention's value and rooting vicariousness in a subject position that's simultaneously powerful and vulnerable. I imagine it as an alluring opportunity to become money, as fungible and fecund and purposeful as money can be, though it is hard to anticipate what it must be like to be spent. Here's how danah boyd put it in an essay that looks at the attention economy, "celebritization" and its consequences mainly for teenage girls.

Celebrity becomes a correlate to a perfect life -- money, designer clothes, and adulthood. What being a ‘celebrity’ means is discarded; fame is an end to itself with the assumption that fame equals all things awesome despite all the copious examples to the contrary. So teens only hold on to the positive aspects, hoping for the benefits of becoming famous and ignoring the consequences.

boyd is writing in response to this Rolling Stone profile by Sabrina Rubin Erdely of a teenager, Kiki Kannibal, who used MySpace to achieve notoriety but as boyd puts it, "lacked the resources to handle the onslaught and never made it big enough to recoup the ground she lost to weather the fame." Because Kiki uses her sexuality for attention but is not sanctioned through a big-media-supported alibi, she is "under attack."

Rubin Erdley explains why Kiki Kannibal doesn't simply go offline:

She can't go offline. One reason is practical: Kiki has a business to run. But the other reason is more existential: If she were to go offline, her link to the world would disappear. This is a girl with 12,000 Twitter followers whose actual life is empty of real relationships. She's trapped in suburban isolation; outside the bubble of her family, her most meaningful interactions are electronic. In real life, she's lost.

The implication seems to be that her pursuit of celebrity has precluded her ability to generate local ties of affection. Learning how to market oneself online is a different skill from learning how to maintain friendships. boyd suggests that girls get trapped in such dynamics because "fame is a toxic substance," noting that "when the attention is good, it’s really good and it feels really good. And when the attention fades, people can feel lonely and anxious, desperate for more, even if it’s negative attention." I wonder if that isn't pathologizing the desire for celebrity too much, pinning it on personal psychology rather than the structure of the new media form that amplifies these tendencies into potentially destructive compulsions. Social media seem to systematically efface the possibility that the desire for fame might not be universal; they do a poor job of allowing people to calibrate their exposure, which is always theoretically infinite despite whatever temporary barrier privacy settings erect. (Anyone within the network can liberate the private information, which in any event belongs to the social media company, not the user.) In other words, I agree with boyd when she writes, "it’s high time that we start reflecting on the societal values that are getting magnified by them."

Maybe this is a bit hyperbolic, but this Vanity Fair story by Amy Fine Collins about prostitution and human trafficking seems the grim logical extension of what the Rolling Stone story describes. The self-coercion boyd mentions with regard to celebritization is arguably on a continuum (albeit a very, very long one) with the horrors described in the Vanity Fair piece, which would make certain Internet users into the equivalent of johns. A lawyer Fine Collins interviewed for the VF story says, “Johns don’t understand what they’re contributing to. It never occurs to them that the woman who is smiling is being abused. They really don’t know what’s going on—and they don’t care." Internet use sometimes seems to invite that kind of indifference, if the manifold examples of trolling, bullying, voyerurism and generalized deinhibition are any testimony. (The Rolling Stone article is about these tendencies as much as it is about the drive for microcelebrity.) The governing ideology seems to be that all the information online has been voluntarily provided and is thus ultimately fair game, as if there are no gray areas or no shifts in context or no possible regrets on the part of the volunteer that should check a consumer's impulse to enjoy it on whatever level one chooses. Social media's immediacy can make it seem as though this sort of heedless entertainment is an entitlement; the underlying implication is that women are naive if they think otherwise. The consumption of microcelebrity is not governed by the norms of friendship, despite social media's liberal usage of its terminology.

Facebook and Cobain's Dilemma; Or, Reliving the Years That Punk Broke (5 Nov 2010)

I'm enjoying these AV Club essays by Steve Hyden about early-90s alternative rock (via mefi). I can't relate to regarding Pearl Jam (the poor man's Bad Company) as an important band at all, but revisiting Nirvana's emergence and the epochal break it signaled at the time seems worthwhile. It is easy to forget how "revolutionary" the concept of Nirvana on regular rock radio was back then, especially since Nirvana has been played side by side with Skynrd on classic-rock radio for more than a decade now. At the time, it didn't seem like Nirvana was supposed to be popular; it seemed that something had gone shockingly wrong with the usually smooth workings of the culture industry's demographic programming. Right or wrong, lots of music geeks suddenly felt a new responsibility for what was popular, because suddenly anything seemed possible. This didn't feel so great; no one is more invested in the established rules of musical taste than the connoisseurs who marginalize themselves through them.

What I'll always remember is being dragged to an apartment party full of frat-guy types early in 1992, and as was typical of the era, the Steve Miller Band's greatest hits album was playing. (This was a period in which the worldly-wise sophomores at the dorm I lived in as a freshman told me that if I wanted to get laid, I'd better have some Journey or Chicago tapes at the ready.) Then the disc player changed to Nevermind, and no one at the party even noticed. I felt instinctively and instantaneously that something horrible had happened while I wasn't paying attention, that the ground had been cut out from beneath me, and I'd need a whole new place to stand in order to feel smugly superior in my tastes. I never experienced co-optation in real time before, and I was young enough and naive enough until then to believe I never would.

After the initial shock passed, I tried to see the upside, tried to glory in what I thought of as "my" music triumphing. I had the idea that I would get newfound respect from the people who had ignored me before for having been into that kind of music all along. Of course, I was grossly mistaken -- the newcomers to Nirvana hadn't changed their attitude toward music at all; they had just embraced the new thing that had come along. It wasn't like they were going to turn to the likes of me and start taking dictation as I pontificated about all the other great bands I was into. It remained true that no magic combination of musical tastes was going to make social anxiety magically disappear. There would be no vindication, no recognition beyond the friendships I'd already made. Nobody, but nobody, cares who "discovered" the good music, and most laugh at the people who think it was themselves. I sort of learned that the hard way, and responded by retreating from contemporary music altogether for years. (Fortunately for me, this was right around the time that tons of fabled albums from the 1960s started to be reissued on CD, and it felt avant-garde to be into the Zombies.)

Hyden's second essay contrasts Axl Rose and Kurt Cobain, who apparently had a feud, despite being pretty similar.

Both men hated the press for spreading “lies” that often turned out to be true, and both were drawn to complicated women who created as much misery as ecstasy in their lives. Both men saw fame as a double-edged sword; it gave them the attention they craved after a lifetime of being ignored, and yet it also seemed to intensify their feelings of self-loathing.

Is it ridiculous to think that the problems of fame Hyden describes, once reserved for reflexive rock stars, now potentially afflict us all? Does microfame yield macro shame? My experience with Facebook has been double-edged in that way: It seemed I had a chance to redeem all that time I felt ignored, when I was one of the first to be into Nirvana and no one gave a damn. But I only rediscovered the same disgust with myself for wallowing in that miserable egomania, as Facebook forced me to recognize yet again that my tastes aren't really my own, because I still want so badly for people to applaud me for them.

Was this Cobain's dilemma, only writ small? You end up ruining all the cool things you thought you wanted to share with the world because you can't share them without tainting them with shameful self-importance. But you never feel important because self-worth is totally bound up with connoisseurship, with having the cool things that you want to share acknowledged. The trap seems even harder to escape now that the pressure and the means to share everything online is ubiquitous, and we're constantly appraised of how our wise deliberations are entirely ignored, at least by somebody.

Pod People (17 Aug 2010)

The BBC reports on Kelly Sutton, the "21st century minimalist" and proprietor of a website called Cult of Less. He had concluded that he needs next to no possessions since the meaningful things in this life (i.e. entertainment media) have become by and large digitized (via Carles).

This 21st-Century minimalist says he got rid of much of his clutter because he felt the ever-increasing number of available digital goods have provided adequate replacements for his former physical possessions.
"I think cutting down on physical commodities in general might be a trend of my generation - cutting down on physical commodities that can be replaced by digital counterparts will be a fact," said Mr Sutton.

This seems like an intermediate phase before we wire the internet directly into our brains and enter the goo pods from The Matrix.

I would have an easier time getting behind this idea if it didn't seem like Sutton was just another stunt consumer trying and succeeding in becoming a meme -- like the guy who didn't ride in a car or the guy who made his family recycle everything or whatever. All these stunts give the impression that ethics themselves are also stunts, good only for attracting lucrative attention, and typically beyond the capabilities of ordinary people in their everyday life. Leading a better life quietly, without drawing lots of attention to it or making it seem extreme, outrageous or clever, is apparently now tantamount to not leading a better life at all. Achieving notoriety is the supreme moral guideline, and lesser imperatives can be subordinated to that ultimate goal.

There is a good chance that consumers of the future will own fewer DVDs, books, and records, and so on, but this will possibly prompt an explosion in the collection of supplementary meaningful objects -- tchotchkes of all kinds, not just culture industry products. Not everyone can be "minimalist" because then minimal will simply become normal, and some new distinctive posture will have to be adopted. The absence of things will no longer do the job of connoting what the presence of things already connotes for most people -- one's self-conception as an externalized posture.

The problem in our culture is not so much that there is too much stuff but that we are afflicted with insatiable egocentricity, which the stuff merely reflects. To borrow from Baudrillard, the stuff elucidates the code, and boasting about getting rid of it is just another moment of elucidation, another way of consuming it -- that is, getting it to signify ourselves. If you are getting rid of stuff and boasting of it online, you are probably canceling the import of your gesture out. Replacing real stuff with digital symbols of its rejection is just a passing gesture rather than real revolution, which requires rethinking the self, not simply what that self possesses.

(Apologies to those who were led to believe by the title that this would be a post about Trumpy doing magic things.)

UPDATE: Andrew Potter has more.

Marina Abramović at MoMA (25 May 2010)

ArtsJournal linked to this New York magazine item written by a performance artist who is performing one of the pieces in the Marina Abramović retrospective at MoMA. Here's the first paragraph:

I am a performance artist myself, and it’s unusual for me to participate in someone else’s work. When I stumbled on MoMA’s casting call, I responded because I’d been steeped in Marina’s work for a long time. My own pieces are very slow-moving. I’m doing one now called Tidal Culture, where I film my own still sittings by the ocean, and make objects out of algae.

One's response to this paragraph may be a good barometer of one's attitude toward this sort of art generally. After I read it, I couldn't stop giggling.

In general, I find the proposition of gawking at living, breathing bodies objectified into "works" already so sufficiently disturbing that I am able to persuade myself that I already get what the pieces are about without having to bother going to see them. That's my loss, I suppose. I hope to go check it out, though, this week -- lunch breaks permitting.

The piece that has drawn the most attention in the retrospective, not surprisingly, is one in which museum goers can wait in line to sit opposite of Abramović and take part in the performance of her piece - a very timely encapsulation of the pseudo-reciprocity of much interactive Web 2.0-style culture as well as, by many accounts, a potent demonstration of how affecting these sorts of participatory experiences can be despite (because of?) how contrived and asymmetrical they are. Standing in line, waiting for one's moment in the chair, one must pass through a welter of superficiality and self-criticism. "How desperate am I for the spotlight?" one must wonder. But the transcendence of the microfame one experiences in the chair, the unflinching and largely undeserved attention, seems to justify all the patient waiting. The structure of the piece builds a powerful machine for simulating focused attention, which turns out to be just as powerful as the kind of reciprocity that involves more than staring. As we've learned from the rise of social media, the presence of a spotlight is all that we need to feel the pleasures of notoriety and self-display, or to have the layers of our personality unveiled to ourselves. (See what I mean? I have already decided what the work is about without having seen it, which makes it hard for me to go and actually see it clearly. I wish I would have stumbled on it by accident.)

Arthur Danto describes the genesis of the piece in this NYT essay, but Carles of Hipster Runoff has perhaps the most illuminating take.

Goodbye, critical consensus (16 Dec 2009)

Reading Simon Reynolds's assessment of best-of-the-decade lists ("musical value and consensus are intimately connected") made me think of how symbiotic the music industry and music critics are; that is, critics can only be as relevant as the culture industry is powerful and univocal. The hegemony of taste that the big labels sought to perpetuate relied on critics' pronouncements, making the release of new Springsteen albums and whatnot seem epochal.

Reynolds shares his hunch that the critical consensus unwound completely in the past decade, leading to a situation where more "good" but "unimportant" records are made.

I reckon that if you were to draw up a top 2,000 albums of every pop decade and compare them, the noughties would win: it would beat the 1990s decisively, the 1980s handsomely, and it would thrash the 1970s and 1960s. But I also reckon that if you were to compare the top 200 albums, it'd be the other way around: the 60s would narrowly beat the 70s, the 70s would slightly less narrowly beat the 80s, the 80s would decisively beat the 90s, and the 90s would leave the noughties trailing in the dust. Yeah, it's just a hunch – but it has the ring of truth. Because I think that the higher reaches of a chart of this kind demand something more than mere musical excellence: there has to be an X factor, the hard-to-define quality that you could call "importance" or "greatness".

Musicians make music; critics and A&R people make "importance" or hype, and the latter is what allows music to become the broadly "unifying force" that critics yearn for it to become. Big, broadly popular records with an aesthetic aura (Reynolds and Pitchfork offer Funeral as the epitome) perhaps validate the importance of critics more than the music itself. It lets us then consume the zeitgeist in product form rather than listen.

The future of recorded music, I hope, belongs to microcommunities, small groups of friends who determine their own standards of importance (through listening rituals, what they play for each other in everyday life) and share them internally without needing to promote those standards online and proselytize. For these communities, it is all "best-of," anything that is heard and remembered, that helps the group cohere, matters. Whether it had been released that year, or decade, or was promoted by the music industry or was a demo from a busker, or whatever, won't matter. Taste can potentially be deindustrialized, and the critics will disappear into the multitude of voices. Ideally, artistic provenance will be relevant to us only if we want it to be.

The enduring creative class and the myth of samizdat (9 August 2008)

In a riposte to tech pessimists like Nicholas Carr, media blogger Jeff Jarvis argues that "the myth of the creative class" is in the process of being extinguished by the internet.

The internet doesn’t make us more creative, I don’t think. But it does enable what we create to be seen, heard, and used. It enables every creator to find a public, the public he or she merits. And that takes creation out of the proprietary hands of the supposed creative class.

Pretty to think so. This is internet ideology at its most inspirational: the Web allows us to be individuals rather than part of a mass addressed by media monoliths, and it allows meritocracy to at last become a reality, and no one will be any more famous than he or she deserves.

The playing field is flat and to stand out one must now do so on merit - as defined by the public rather than the priests - which will be rewarded with links and attention. This is our link economy, our culture of links. It is a meritocracy, only now there are many definitions of merit and each must be earned.

A look back at the history of internet fads makes one skeptical though. And it seems that the power networks of the offline media replicate themselves online -- the commercial media has a more vested interest in drumming up traffic and integrating content production with advertising support, so they invest money and effort accordingly, with the effect of reproducing the offline mode of production online. Independent bloggers are adopted by national publications, and their content is branded by the big media companies, and the power of branding to confer authority begins to exert itself over the once-wide-open sphere of communication. It becomes harder to be some random person with a blogger account and still get discovered and linked to -- it can happen, but then so could my letter to the editor be published as a column on the NYT opinion page. It's just not very likely.

As Jarvis would have it, Web space has replaced the hip urban centers celebrated by Richard Florida as the site where inspired minds congregate to inspire one another.

This link ecology does potentially change the nature of creativity. It makes it more collaborative, not just in the act but in the inspiration. Coelho’s Witch of Portobello is the spark that leads to a movie made by its readers. Same with Stern, LonelyGirl, Colbert. Perhaps the role of the creative class is not so much to make finished products but to inspire more to be made. It is the flint of creativity. It’s the internet - Google, Flickr, YouTube, and old, mass media as their accessories - that bring flint and spark together.

This sort of thing plays out as the much heralded "remix culture" -- consumers become producers by using digital cultural products as a language for their own creative expressions. This undermines the old allegiances that paved the way for subcultures anchored in various nexuses of music and fashion and zines and so on, and introduces a more motley pastiche form of culture that is at the same time more homogeneous than ever. The internet -- the link economy, the amateur parodies and homages of culture industry product, etc. -- becomes a hegemonic form for cultural expression even as it become more heterogeneous in its composite parts. You might make a steampunk rap video with snippets of sitcoms mixed in, but it will still be posted on YouTube in the end. It has become so much easier to publish samizdat that samizdat now no longer has any meaning as a form.

I'm not sure this more democratic access to the means of distribution ultimately frees up an abundance of heretofore suppressed talent or shifts anything away from the established creative class -- the anointed ones who shape the culture that consumers remix. Yes, the internet provides uncolonized space for cultural activity, a space that is ever expanding. You never reach the Western shore. There is always more room for "creative" pioneers to stake claims. But the majority of cultural consumers aren't interested in lighting out for the territories, and the creative class continues to run what is recognized socially as the civilized portion of that vast online space, and it is slowly expanding its control assimilating the more promising outliers. This seems no different from how things have always worked in the culture industries; if anything the dependence on the law-giving creative class strengthens with so much chaos lurking at the fringes.

Post-commercial entertainment (27 Nov 2007)

The Hollywood writers' strike certainly helps throw this in relief, but it seems clear that the commercial entertainment industry is in trouble. Digitization and dispersed internet distribution has made it impossible for them to control supply, and the intellectual property concepts their business models depend on seem likely to come under attack or undergo extreme revision in an era where anonymous collaboration and open-source development become more and more customary. Not to wax too utopian about it, but it seems like the idea of commercial artists working for industry middlemen is rapidly becoming a thing of the past, and as that changes, the means by which our society defines what makes for an artist or entertainer will change as well. Reality TV and blogging are just the most obvious examples of semi-professional and, in some cases, post-commercial entertainment supplanting the work of pros. The expectations we have of polish and high-end production values may continue to become more and more relaxed; what lo-fi indie rock helped pioneer could become acceptable in every genre and every medium, as YouTube would suggest. (Though all I ever seem to use YouTube for is watching old clips of bands from the 1960s and 1970s appearing on European TV; it's become sort of a random-access collective memory. In fact, I can safely say that the internet, by enriching my access to obscure culture detritus from past decades, has guaranteed that I won't pay any attention to contemporary culture for the foreseeable future.) While paid ads still support part of the distribution medium for these works (i.e. Google's ad brokering makes it worth its while to host all this junk), the creators themselves, who are confronted with very little overhead for making and self-distributing their own product, are not necessarily compensated monetarily and seem to have attention (becoming more and more measurable, more and more useful as a means for status competition) rather than monetary reward as their motivation. This seems like a good thing, at first, but is it actually a license or a prod for all art to become even more about ego than communication? in other words, is self-expression as a goal wildly overrated, especially now that it's so easy, now that we are in the so-called age of microcelebrity Clive Thompson notes in this Wired column? Is art being subsumed to an even greater degree by the (commercially derived) ideology of personal branding? Are we getting the worse of both worlds -- the superficial, narcissistic culture without the discipline brought on by the need to make money?

In his book In Praise of Commercial Culture, economist Tyler Cowen points out that on the 18th century, when the printing press was having similar effects on culture as the internet is having now, critics worried that the commercialization of art, the market for books, would erode the power of fame as an incentive, without which writers would produce nothing but trash. But with fame devalued now that the trappings of celebrity are open to all, it seems like money and the professionalization that went along with it were last-ditch means to uphold standards. In Cowen's view, 18th century critics sought to impose aesthetic standards and use fame as the reward that would induce writers to adhere to them. In a similar fashion, centralized cultural production enables a few media corporations, or the state (as in China, Soviet Russia, etc.), to impose similar standards. In a market economy, mass popularity seems to justify after the fact those decisions made early on about which works met the approved standards and were worthy of being supported. But mass popularity, or monetary reward may not be as significant when you can bask in the recognition of a niche audience and feel righteous about not having sold out. The "microcelebrity" thesis perhaps bears out Cowen's argument that there is not a limited supply of fame, and that technology and the density of intertextual references multiplies the amount of fame there is to go around, albeit in ever finer measurements. But conversely, the demands on our attention may be stretched to the limit, leaving us in even greater need for filters and organizers of what's available. Commercial gatekeepers once served this function; perhaps now social networking tools (linked in to targeted advertising) will replace them. Nothing, though, stands to discourage anyone from producing culture and "cluttering" the public sphere with it. I waver between thinking this is a pervasive triumph over passivity and fretting that it's a disaster that's made self-branding and the commercialization of our intimate identity commonplace -- an eagerly sought accomplishment that we hope to confirm in the public sphere.

Having cheered for so long against the culture industry Goliath (without ever really suspecting it was actually vulnerable), it hasn't often occurred to me to consider what we lose with its decline. The need to make art that will sell is usually derided as forcing artists to pursue the lowest common denominator and compromise their vision. But it may also have required artists to focus, to consider how effective their work would be on audiences. Respect for the bottom line typically makes people more receptive to criticism, and criticism from invested parties generally improves things. And the commercial entertainment industry performed a useful filtering service, putting hurdles between artists and audiences that eliminated some poetasters (and, unfortunately, some talented but easily deterred entertainers). One could be critical of what made it through that initial filter, but usually the fact that it made it through meant it was worth taking the time to criticize -- it had been chosen and produced among thousands of other contenders. But free from the restrictions of commercialism, artists can ignore criticism and be as self-indulgent as they choose, selecting self-referential topics and making no effort to generalize subject matter so that others may get more out of them. Instead, artists can develop the expectation that others should be interested in their work for the sake of person making it, that it be interesting only on a personal level, the way Facebook pages are supposed to be.