Today Gawker launched a fairly unimpressive upgrade to their ‘Gawker Stalker’ feature (which is people sending in their celebrity sightings, the more salubrious details the better, which are posted same day), adding a mapping function, and encouraging people to submit information as quickly as possible (though the posting is moderated, so the timeliness may be lacking). I say unimpressive a little petulantly because, like every undermotivated, arch, aging hipster, I had a better idea for this a long time ago.
A few years back I remember coming across a report about a kidnapping threat involving Russell Crowe. This may have been big news, but I am not really abreast of the Us Weekly set. Anyhoo, it was reported that he was assigned FBI protection. I remember being somewhat indignant for two reasons: one, the danger was causally related to his professional existence, the benefits of which made him more than able to procure his own protection and, two, he was a foreign national! Let Australia send their version of the FBI out to protect their national treasure. This, of course, was well before we learned that his fighting skills were impressive even when faced with only the limited weapon choice of office equipment.
I had a plan to launch a website, Kidnap Russell Crowe! which would be a map/database affair where people could report all their sightings, so if one actually was inclined to do the deed, they could find the information quickly. Figuring I didn’t need any FBI attention myself, I stopped at making the logo (this was also the days before Busted Tees, so I lost out on my Web 1.1 millions).
I didn’t feel bad circulating the idea, because the role of the celebrity is a strange one, all signifier, consuming frightening amounts of resources, skewing notions of identity, trickling down into the truly pathetic spectacle of reality shows and dispersing the faulty notion that everyone can be a celebrity in some form. It’s an input/output problem: you make a film that needs 40 million people to pay to see it for you to succeed (and get paid), you have to take some downside, right?
I figured the site would simply be a democratic weapon in the fight against mindless hagiography. The organized effort to command the attention of the populace and focus it on someone reciting words someone else has written is substantial, it is mostly unforgiving, and lacks any sense of community.
The advent of the celebrity for its own sake — which to be sure, has been around in one guise of another for some time, but has gotten particularly fevered of late — is a logical extension of our obsession with fame. But it is not as simple as the mindless distraction of a comfortable society. It leaks into every corner, where the pursuit of fame becomes its own end, and that pursuit is undertaken with frightening ferocity, and once realized, is leveraged for putative expertise or authority on any range of subjects. The model is grafted onto every profession where there isn’t a hard and fast arbiter of value (say, home runs, but even that is fungible, it seems).
Gawker is coy about whether it stands outside, or squarely in the zone of this circle jerk, a stance that was codified when the founders of the last real satiric voice in this city went on to helm Vanity Fair and New York magazines. And since it in and of itself is a vehicle for fame with a low threshold of skill, it is sometimes hard to determine whether the jibes are only the grousing of those not yet in the club of useless celebrity.
And it’s a really poor implementation. We should have far more sophisticated tools at this stage. Then again, since they aren’t really fighting the process that much (it is quite the golden goose), it will be up to others to deploy the artillery that might tamp down the desire to be so maniacally promoted.
Am I advocating violence here? No. But there must be a point at which where the endless promotion of one’s persona becomes debilitating enough that they retreat. Felix Salmon thinks that setting off down this road sunders some fragile relationship New Yorkers have with celebrity, but he misses the point of that dialectic. New Yorkers ignore celebrities because the notion that deference to someone as superior is an anathema to their own self-involved notion of accomplishment.
The question is a little larger than whether or not it’s fair to develop a web site with an RSS feed that tells you when Paris Hilton takes a shit (really, that’s thinking a bit small when you consider GPS and mobile-to-mobile communications technologies). After all, the woman got famous by flashing her cooch at all of us.
The question is how we will define space and community, and the fact the every pseudo libertarian trust model built into the various online ‘communites’ (which are increasingly affecting how and when we interact in the ‘real world’) has been either poorly implemented or easily circumvented. When everyone is carrying around a sort of self-stalking tool like Dodgeball on their cell phone, the degradation of interaction in the city will not be manifest in the disappearance of silence or privacy when Lou Reed gets brunch, but rather in the secretive communications that will silently float from phone to phone.
Celebrity stalking is a self-regulating process. As long as Paris Hilton is trying to get our attention, people will respond in kind (and really, how long until some down at the heel C-Lister starts sending in fabricated sightings, if it hasn’t already happened?). But we will only hear about Lou Reed’s brunch choices so many times, because not that many people care. Remember, John Hinckley didn’t need the Internet to commit a heinous act.
But how we can prevent ‘social networking software’ (a noxious misnomer if there ever was one) from degrading the happenstance, the spontaneous, the yes discomforting interactions this city often requires is an even thornier issue. In the meantime, if we can make it a little less attractive of the Lindsay Lohans of this world to be so thoroughly visible, well, I can’t really see how that is a loss for our local culture.
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Every breath you take.
Today Gawker launched a fairly unimpressive upgrade to their ‘Gawker Stalker’ feature (which is people sending in their celebrity sightings, the more salubrious details the better, which are posted same day), adding a mapping function, and encouraging people to submit information as quickly as possible (though the posting is moderated, so the timeliness may be lacking). I say unimpressive a little petulantly because, like every undermotivated, arch, aging hipster, I had a better idea for this a long time ago.
A few years back I remember coming across a report about a kidnapping threat involving Russell Crowe. This may have been big news, but I am not really abreast of the Us Weekly set. Anyhoo, it was reported that he was assigned FBI protection. I remember being somewhat indignant for two reasons: one, the danger was causally related to his professional existence, the benefits of which made him more than able to procure his own protection and, two, he was a foreign national! Let Australia send their version of the FBI out to protect their national treasure. This, of course, was well before we learned that his fighting skills were impressive even when faced with only the limited weapon choice of office equipment. I had a plan to launch a website, Kidnap Russell Crowe! which would be a map/database affair where people could report all their sightings, so if one actually was inclined to do the deed, they could find the information quickly. Figuring I didn’t need any FBI attention myself, I stopped at making the logo (this was also the days before Busted Tees, so I lost out on my Web 1.1 millions). I didn’t feel bad circulating the idea, because the role of the celebrity is a strange one, all signifier, consuming frightening amounts of resources, skewing notions of identity, trickling down into the truly pathetic spectacle of reality shows and dispersing the faulty notion that everyone can be a celebrity in some form. It’s an input/output problem: you make a film that needs 40 million people to pay to see it for you to succeed (and get paid), you have to take some downside, right? I figured the site would simply be a democratic weapon in the fight against mindless hagiography. The organized effort to command the attention of the populace and focus it on someone reciting words someone else has written is substantial, it is mostly unforgiving, and lacks any sense of community. The advent of the celebrity for its own sake — which to be sure, has been around in one guise of another for some time, but has gotten particularly fevered of late — is a logical extension of our obsession with fame. But it is not as simple as the mindless distraction of a comfortable society. It leaks into every corner, where the pursuit of fame becomes its own end, and that pursuit is undertaken with frightening ferocity, and once realized, is leveraged for putative expertise or authority on any range of subjects. The model is grafted onto every profession where there isn’t a hard and fast arbiter of value (say, home runs, but even that is fungible, it seems). Gawker is coy about whether it stands outside, or squarely in the zone of this circle jerk, a stance that was codified when the founders of the last real satiric voice in this city went on to helm Vanity Fair and New York magazines. And since it in and of itself is a vehicle for fame with a low threshold of skill, it is sometimes hard to determine whether the jibes are only the grousing of those not yet in the club of useless celebrity. And it’s a really poor implementation. We should have far more sophisticated tools at this stage. Then again, since they aren’t really fighting the process that much (it is quite the golden goose), it will be up to others to deploy the artillery that might tamp down the desire to be so maniacally promoted. Am I advocating violence here? No. But there must be a point at which where the endless promotion of one’s persona becomes debilitating enough that they retreat. Felix Salmon thinks that setting off down this road sunders some fragile relationship New Yorkers have with celebrity, but he misses the point of that dialectic. New Yorkers ignore celebrities because the notion that deference to someone as superior is an anathema to their own self-involved notion of accomplishment. The question is a little larger than whether or not it’s fair to develop a web site with an RSS feed that tells you when Paris Hilton takes a shit (really, that’s thinking a bit small when you consider GPS and mobile-to-mobile communications technologies). After all, the woman got famous by flashing her cooch at all of us. The question is how we will define space and community, and the fact the every pseudo libertarian trust model built into the various online ‘communites’ (which are increasingly affecting how and when we interact in the ‘real world’) has been either poorly implemented or easily circumvented. When everyone is carrying around a sort of self-stalking tool like Dodgeball on their cell phone, the degradation of interaction in the city will not be manifest in the disappearance of silence or privacy when Lou Reed gets brunch, but rather in the secretive communications that will silently float from phone to phone. Celebrity stalking is a self-regulating process. As long as Paris Hilton is trying to get our attention, people will respond in kind (and really, how long until some down at the heel C-Lister starts sending in fabricated sightings, if it hasn’t already happened?). But we will only hear about Lou Reed’s brunch choices so many times, because not that many people care. Remember, John Hinckley didn’t need the Internet to commit a heinous act. But how we can prevent ‘social networking software’ (a noxious misnomer if there ever was one) from degrading the happenstance, the spontaneous, the yes discomforting interactions this city often requires is an even thornier issue. In the meantime, if we can make it a little less attractive of the Lindsay Lohans of this world to be so thoroughly visible, well, I can’t really see how that is a loss for our local culture.