Celebrities 30 years ago used to be celebrities because they did something.
Influencers are mostly famous for being famous.
Influencers are mostly famous for being famous.
You are looking at the past through rose colored glasses. I don't think Anna Nicole Smith is any more particularly talented that an influencer today (infact influencers today deal with more competition than celebrities 30 years ago).
Edit: not only that, she wasn't particularly famous. I suggest anyone disagreeing provide some names of people who were arbitrarily famous, specifically wherein 20% of that generation would have aspired to become. It simply didn't exist. I suggest most people who disagree weren't even alive a the time.
In the perennial game of 'prejudices about generations' I think this one is a material issue.
If i, as a person who dont give a shit about celebrities, know who she was, then she's probably reasonably famous. At least as famous as a modern B-tier influencer.
Fame, Aspiration and attitudes towards those people are empirically measurable.
There were very few 'Anna Nicole Smiths' before 2000, it wasn't really until Paris Hilton who broke the mould and 'professionalized' the notion.
And nobody wanted to be Anna Nicole Smith, there was no aspirational aspect to her fame.
Just because you didn't know about socialites before MTV poured millions of marketing dollars in Paris doesn't mean they didn't exist. Anna Nicole Smith came into real fame in 1993. You have women like Gigi Hadid and Kate Moss who were very famous socialites who were the aspirations of teen girls everywhere. Typically they were models, but that isn't any different than an influencer today who takes selfies. I know I'm being extremely condescending to both of these women but on the barmoeter for "doing something" there isn't that much different from someone like Kate Moss and Addison Rae or Valkyrae. To claim that no one wanted to be Kate Moss in the 90s given how much of a problem anorexia became is ridiculous.
Honestly, someone equally unaware could say the same thing about gaming. It's like saying "Notch" professionalized the notion of being a game developer. For Gen Z there is likely far more people who played Minecraft than have played Quake, but it would be ridiculous to say that game development didn't exist before Notch or that people didn't aspire to be game developers before Minecraft.
>And nobody wanted to be Anna Nicole Smith
This is a woman who had several modeling deals but I guess the executives at those companies were completely braindead and didn't realize that people didn't care for her.
How is this a 'no true scotsman' defense? I don't see the relevance.
Some less obvious talents like connecting with a large number of people over one-way videos propelled PewDiePie's and Markiplier's channels to great heights. It appears easy to do what they do, but given such intense competition and few such successes, it's likely they provide something pretty rare that people want. (Some channels admittedly have early mover advantages).
It is possible that algorithms and crowdsourced data in Youtube and Tik Tok are more meritocratic than the more traditional ways of selecting talents.
He's not famous for being famous, the dude worked at NASA for almost a decade and is a legit accomplished engineer.
What I'm mostly referring to are the "influencers" who follow this formula:
1) Be hot 2) Don't be not hot 3) Get on TV 4) Goto 3
Now you're famous. What are your skills? Looking good on TV and stirring up drama on and off screen.
we are in a postmodern world now, everything is meta. We deal with the celeb and scrap the work
Step 4: ...
Step 5: profit
There's a positive argument to be made that YouTube only cares about eyeballs and wallets, and the characteristics of who's getting YouTube those eyeballs and wallets is of no interest to them.
Or Harvey Weinstein.