Photograph by Adam Levey Justin Kan's celebrity career began on March 19 at 2 am, when he woke up and strapped a videocam to his head. Since then, he's provided a live Web feed to his fans every day, all day long, letting them observe life from his perspective. Kan's allure is unrelated to talent or physical appearance (he rarely turns the camera on himself). Watching his streaming video and sending him IMs with comments and suggestions, his audience gets to experience his rise to fame from the inside out.
Kan is no Justin Timberlake — or even a gossip magnet like Paris Hilton. But he is taking advantage of the same underlying forces that gave them star power: As media have gone interactive, stardom has become participatory. Celebrity has gone open source. Forget Hollywood, Big Music, and Broadway. The unruly crowd now auditions its own stars, wiki—style, helping to decide who will enter the world stage and how long they'll stay in the public eye. As a result, celebrities are performing their essential role in society — binding us together through gossip, inspiration, and slander — more efficiently than ever.
Of course, we've always been invested in the lives of the famous. That's their primary value to us. While the legitimately accomplished contribute to society regardless of what we think of them personally — it made no difference that Charles Lindbergh was photogenic when he was flying over the Atlantic — celebrities matter most when their extracurricular affairs and binges resonate culturally. With society endlessly subdividing into narrower niches, we're much less likely to collectively experience the same books, TV shows, or songs. Celebrities provide vital common reference points. We know when Lindsay Lohan is in rehab. And for an instant, we could all recognize the father of Anna Nicole Smith's baby.
The new wiki celebrity is exquisitely tuned to the culture's anxieties, needs, and desires. The Grammy-winning success of American Idol's Carrie Underwood stands for our belief in the American dream; the staying power of Sanjaya Malakar, voted into round after round in part at the irony-laden urging of radio host Howard Stern, shows that stardom has nothing to do with talent. And Lauren Conrad's onscreen metamorphosis in the first season of MTV's Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County demonstrates our potential for reinvention.
Wiki celebrity works because of the blogosphere, which has given us an unprecedented conduit for direct involvement in celebrity lives. Sites such as AOL's TMZ.com provide a constant feed of personal information — conveniently sorted into categories such as Break-Ups and Train Wrecks — with a submissions page promising that "all hot tips are immediately forwarded to TMZ staff." On Gawker.com, readers contribute to a Stalker page, where a map of New York City is continuously annotated with celebrity sightings. On a recent afternoon, actor Alec Baldwin was spotted talking on a cell phone at Broadway and West 65th Street. "He is goin' nuts," reported a citizen gossip monger. "Totally unreal. "
Celebrities can also contribute to their wiki image. Many have chosen to blog in self-defense. On her MySpace page, the formerly full-figured porn star Jenna Jameson addresses gossip about her weight loss. " People are hateful and accuse me of being a drug addict or an anorexic," she writes. "Does anyone remember the fact that I am going through a nasty divorce?" And in the Huffington Post, Mia Farrow presents a photo diary of her travels in Darfur, signaling her transformation from actress to activist.
Obviously, there's a distinction between Jameson's self-serving jottings and Farrow's authentic activism. Like Bono and Angelina Jolie, Farrow is leveraging her celebrity for the benefit of society. The 24/7 availability of today's wiki celebrities, their total negotiability as conversational pawns, probably makes it easier for people with something to say to be taken seriously. The wiki celebs so flawlessly deliver grade-A gossip that Farrow, Bono, and Jolie are freed to promote worthy causes and appear in photo ops with world leaders. But the greater significance is for the thinkers and innovators — those deserving of long-term fame — who may now be able to totally circumvent the papparazzi treatment. Perhaps with less attention from everyone, Lindbergh would have made commercial aircraft as efficient as The Spirit of St. Louis. But he died nine years before Justin Kan was born.
Jonathon Keats (jonathon_keats@yahoo.com) wrote about language researcher Deb Roy in issue 15.04.
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