On the GeekCruise we took last month, we got to know the actor John DeLancie (at least as much as one can over a few meals and a few more hours of hang time). Before the cruise, we'd never heard of him — a fact that astonishes our friends who watch Star Trek or who have had other opportunities to sample John's work, which is surely is no less terrific than the delightful readings he treated us to on the cruise. But we didn't connect around any of that. We connected around personal shit — some of it funny, some of it painful, all of it deep. We came away liking the guy in ways that are not only outside the scope of celebrity, but excluded by its nature.
Celebrity involves disconnected veneration, adoration and other forms of subordination to elevated status. We've made an industry of it, and that industry has caused massive economic distortions that cannot help but collapse — undermined by nothing more than what in Cluetrain we called "networked markets" that are "getting smarter faster than most companies."
(Add to that most governments, schools and other institutions that thrive to any degree on our inability or unwillingness to inform ourselves.)
Over the past couple years we've all bashed dot-coms for their insane excesses; but that's nothing like what we'll be doing once we get some historical distance on the very similar kind of insanties that have been pro forma in the entertainment industry for the better part of a century.
The entertainment industry is fundamentally about making stars. In spite of its name, it is not about entertaining people, except as an effect of the star system, which is really about entertaining mass quantities of people. SMM manufactures, packages and delivers celebrity as a product. It works to cause appetites for it, and to deliver mass quantities of stuff made appealing by it, for as long as any variety of it might last. And since celebrity is perishable, the machinery keeps doing it over and over and over again.
Article comments
1 - marilyn
I have found my people at last! *sigh* Sooooo I am not the only person in the universe who sees no talent in most celebrity's or their pim-- uhhh agents and managers. Heh. A place where nothing Britany does is important???? To anybody?? Utopia. And let's not forget gang-banger rap, where talent is not only optional, but often completely forbidden! Get down on my thang, uh sweet baby, killa cop, ya'll. Did I just write a hit rap song? Heh. Glad I found ya. Later
2 - Eric Olsen
Glad you found us Marilyn, although we don't dismiss pop and rap ouright, and celebrity can be a fun or even revealing topic.