I found this passage in the New York Times (reg. required) article about internet (and now TV) star Tila Tequila to be spot on in its characterization of how the combination of the internet and reality television have democratized fame.

We've gone from dazed idolatry to another and more familiar form of identification. Fame, when not concocted by Hollywood and available to only the genetically gifted few, takes on softer contours. It becomes less an exalted state than a permeable one, available to those from classes and cohorts that, in the days of the studio monoliths, the gatekeepers of the star-making machine kept at bay.

By the standards of the new "Jackass" landscape, traditional stardom, with its career building stations-of-the-cross, its rigid talent requirements, its "Entourage" shtick, seems clunky and out of step with a culture so much more fluid now that a hit record -- like the recent Internet sensation "I'll Kill Him," by Soko -- could emerge from a young French woman's bedroom and MySpace page.

Who says any longer that one must be able to sing or dance or emote in order to attract an audience or, anyway, a batch of new friends in the ether? Who says that only winners win? As reality TV, with its durable affection for flame-outs, car wrecks and actual losers, has made abundantly clear, even after the tribal council has voted you off their tropical island, you're still welcome in our homes.

What's equally interesting to me is the proliferation of imitation videos as sort of a secondary fame market. Even if you can't come up with the original zeitgeist video like Soulja Boy, you can still find a modest amount of internet fame with your imitation of that moment.

Not sure how this is related, but when I was visiting CNN, they were talking about how to get young people to upload their own news video -- one person remarked that they have been getting one kind of interesting video from teenagers: video imitating CNN anchors. Teens would create their own satirical skits making fun of the news and upload it to CNN ("The Daily Show" effect?).

And sort of related: Filmmakers cast movie via MySpace (BBC)

Posted by anastasia