Posts Tagged ‘microfame game’

“Coming Correct” in Self-Promotion and Other Tidbits from E! Online’s Leslie Gornstein

March 16th, 2009 by AV Flox in integrity, interview, personal brand

While Celebrity gossip blogs have existed for a while and Hulu, which brings film and television to computers everywhere, won best of show for film and TV at the South by Southwest: Interactive awards this year, in general, the merging of Hollywood and the web has been slow and clumsy.

Enter Leslie Gornstein, the Answer Bitch for E! Online. After working at a start-up that failed and spending some years freelancing, Gornstein got a column online when an editor at E! approached her in 2004.

“He was looking for a sassier, angrier ‘Ask Marilyn’ character,” Gornstein explained over coffee at Caffe Luxxe in Brentwood, where she met with me, Laurie Percival, editor-in-chief of Lalawag and Macala Wright, director of marketing and PR for 1928 Jewelry.

“He said, ‘I’m looking for someone to be the answer bitch, you can be the answer bitch,’” Gornstein recalled. “I said ‘all right.’”

Thus, the entertainment question and answer column ‘Ask The Answer Bitch’ was born. Gornstein never looked back. After living and breathing the celebrity lifestyle for four years, writing a book was natural progression. Her book The A-List Playbook, was released by Skyhorse Publishing last month.

“Despite what’s going on in technology right now and despite the ways that you can push yourself out there to a lot of people, people still see a book as a calling card,” Gornstein said. “I learned some really fascinating basic facts about Hollywood. But there was no compendium of it anywhere—the fact that celebrities have three nannies per child, the fact the average celebrity spends an hour a day with their child, and maybe three to four during a vacation period, the fact that most celebrities get 20,000 dollars a month of free stuff—and the fact that’s how you can gauge if they’re A-list or not. I wanted to put it in a survival guide format because I thought that was the most fun way to read it. But really it’s a window for the rest of us about how those people really live.”

“Are you using social media to promote your book?” Lalawag’s Laurie Percival asked.

“Everything that has an internet connection is now my bitch when it comes to promoting my book,” Gornstein responded, laughing. “Facebook, MySpace—not so much, there is something really disco about that. It looks like a Lebanese disco whenever I go on there! I can’t deal with that. So Facebook, Twitter, E! Online—even World of Warcraft. If it has a line out to the world, it’s my bitch.”

Gornstein, who started tweeting as @answerbitch only last November has almost 2,000 followers. She follows almost everyone back.

Macala Wright can’t get over the information saturation that comes with following that many people on Twitter. She confessed she’d pulled a Loic just a few weeks ago to make her stream more manageable and reflected on how annoyed some people got when they were unfollowed.

“Someone has decided following everyone back is Tweetiquette and you know what? I think people are taking things way too personal,” Gornstein replied. “Because, what does that mean when I don’t return someone’s phone call? Sometimes I’m just not going to return a phone call.”

“I think about this all the time, too,” Laurie Percival pitched in. “Do I have to reply to every @message? How do people do this all day long? There’s no way!”

She described with awe the people who sent personalized direct messages (DMs) after she followed them.

“I just don’t know how they have time,” she said. “So I just don’t do it.”

“You could send out auto-DMs.” Gornstein suggested.

We looked at her with horror. I think one of us even gasped.

“The only reason I think an auto-DM would be offensive, and I got one of these recently, ‘thank you for following, be sure to link my blog’—that’s not cool,” Gornstein defended her position. “When people follow me I send out an auto-message that says, ‘Welcome to the all American festival that is me!’ I don’t see that as a particularly obnoxious thing to do.”

Gornstein seems to have an inherent understanding of how to work new media and leverage the power of real-time user feedback.

“I’m really careful to do it,” she said about self-promotion. “You have to come correct about it, as the drug dealers say. You come to people correct and you say ‘yes, I’m pimping now,’ or I’ll make it participatory and say, ‘correct me if I’m wrong…’ and people like that. It’s conversation. I think that’s respectful.”

She limits the bulk of her self-promotion to Sundays and constantly invites input from her followers and readers. To a large extent, the web has allowed her following to grow and thrive.

“On the internet we have the concept of microcelebrity—being famous for fifteen people, as Momus said in the early 90s,” I told her. “Do you think of yourself as one?”

“I’m definitely famous for fifteen people,” she responded. “My husband loves me!”

“Do you think microcelebrities could apply some of the knowledge found in your book?”

“No,” she said, laughing. “You really need to be visible planet-wide to be able to sling this kind of power around.”

“So you don’t think Julia Allison could get through airport security without having to remove her stilettos?”

“No,” she replied. “Microcelebrities are most famous to themselves. Without the internet, would these people be famous?”

Sounds like a challenge to me. Hear that, NonSociety?

Gornstein pointed to a copy of her book on the coffee table, buried under iPhones, packs of cigarettes and idle Flip cams.

“These people are all cross-media megastars,” she said. “If the internet did not exist, Julia Allison would be a nice intern somewhere, working her microminis and then maybe one day meet Tina Brown and have something nice happen to her for a year. She’s extremely bright and when you read what she writes you see it’s well thought-out, but to be really famous your face needs to be recognizable, your name needs to be recognizable—by more than a small subset of people. If you said, ‘I saw Julia Allison yesterday!’ most people wouldn’t know what you were talking about. But if you said, ‘I saw Julia Roberts yesterday!’ they’d know what you were talking about.”

She’s right. Even so, the section about how Paris Hilton plays the press (“The Paris Hilton Method,” page 65) could be of some use to aspiring fameballers—I’ll trade Laurie’s home phone for Owen Thomas’!

Seriously, though, the way fame is spreading on the web, and with microcelebrity having such a wide and bizarre array of wonders and dangers (from the power you can exert dating the founders of your choice start-up to death by commenter execution) I think there’s a definite sequel there.

Of Possible Interest:
Leslie Gornstein will be signing books and holding a live chat in Los Angeles on Thursday, March 19, 2009, at 7:00PM at the Barnes and Noble at the Grove on 189 Grove Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90036. Call (323) 525-0270.

Full disclosure—Leslie gave me a copy of her book. Yes, I’ve read it, but I’m not gonna tell you just how juicy it is. I’ll leave it by saying that two friends have already attempted to steal it.

pass it on!
[del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [kirtsy] [Ma.gnolia] [Mixx] [Propeller] [Reddit] [Slashdot] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Email] More »

Tags: , , , , , , ,
1 Comment Comments



Trolls and LOLz: Cruelty On The Internet

July 21st, 2008 by AV Flox in Uncategorized

“Why should we all build our homes and give residence to the trolls under them?” asks Jason Calacanis in his first e-mail after retiring from blogging.

“Comments on blogs inevitably implode, and we all accept it under the belief that ‘open is better!’ Open is not better. Running a blog is like letting a virtuoso play for 90 minutes are Carnegie Hall, and then seconds after their performance you run to the back alley and grab the most inebriated homeless person drag them on stage and ask them what they think of the performance they overheard in the alley. They then take a piss on the stage and say ‘F-you’ to the people who just had a wonderful experience for 90 or 92 minutes. That’s openness for you… how far we’ve come! We’ve put the wisdom of the deranged on the same level as the wisdom of the wise.”

Calacanis is done with blogging. He’s now limiting his interaction to 1,000 of his readers through a mailing list. His first e-mail, sent out on July 12, went over some of the reasons he chose to make the change from a public blog to the more one-to-one kind of exchange that occurs over e-mail: in short, people are assholes.

LET’S GO WITH THE DIGG MODEL AND LET THEM HAVE MOB RULE

Who doesn’t remember the Sarah Lacy interview of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg at SXSWi in March? Before the keynote address was over my Twitter timeline was exploding with cruel and unusual remarks about the journalist. No one is arguing it was a genius interview, or even a decent one—it wasn’t. But it certainly didn’t warrant the response it received, either.

“Try doing what I do for a living,” Lacy told the antagonistic crowd toward the end of the interview, completely exasperated. And so the mob began to scream that she turn the microphone over. Angry, Lacy snapped, “Let’s go with the Digg model and let them have mob rule!”

And what about when blogger and former editor of Gawker, Emily Gould appeared on the cover of the New York Times Magazine? NYT.com had to temporarily lock the discussion because its moderators were overwhelmed by the number of comments—most of them negative, of course. But the comments were nothing compared to the kind of rage that tore across the blogosphere. Gould was lynched and quartered, web 2.0-style.

When Wired’s latest issue hit the newsstands with blogger and former Star dating columnist Julia Allison on the cover, Gawker titled a piece about it The Backhanded Art of the Unflattering Cover and closed the piece by saying, “More importantly: editors and contributors who perhaps have some doubt as to your value as a cover model may undermine the honor with unflattering photoshop work and coverlines.”

Commenters didn’t waste a second before jumping in: “How do you photoshop someone’s legs into such elongated, hideous oblivion?” and “I love JA’s shoes! Do they come in human sizes?” and “I’d be totally behind that Wired cover if she were on a toilet and there was a pregnancy test in her hand with a pentagram on the indicator.”

And what about the deletion scandal between BoingBoing and San Francisco Chronicle’s sex columnist and Fleshbot contributor Violet Blue? Late last month, Violet Blue noticed that the content that related to her or her work on BoingBoing had disappeared (LA Times Web Scout blog has the number of missing entries at around 72). BoingBoing offered no explanation for the removal of these posts until after the issue exploded in the public square.

When interviewed by LA Times, BoingBiong’s Xeni Jardin, who had edited the one post Violet Blue had written and who had made most of the mentions to the sex blogger in other BoingBoing posts said:

A year and a half ago when I unpublished this stuff, it was a time when there were a couple of hate web sites specifically about me. Kooky, creepy Internet guys were posting all sorts of grotesque, sexually explicit stuff about me, and trying to find photos of my house and information of my family. Really gross stuff that frightened me. When you’re at the receiving end of that kind of attention, would you voluntarily go out with private information in something that just felt sensitive and felt like your private editorial prerogative?

The problem, of course, is that BoingBoing isn’t a personal blog. But this isn’t about what happened there. It’s about what happens to people online.

IT’S MY BLOG, I CAN BITCH IF I WANT TO

The internet makes us easy targets. But not without our help.

Over 12 million American adults currently maintain a blog, according to BlogWorldExpo. While we know that content we’re putting online is accessible to anyone with an internet connection, it’s almost impossible to resist the urge to overshare.

Most recently, my good friend Katerina received threats from her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend and baby momma after the latter found her blog.

“She wants to get a restraining order to keep me away from her son because of the high sexual content of my blog,” Katerina told me.

“That’s patently ridiculous.” I responded. “If she hadn’t screwed herself by changing her name to something so absolutely generic maybe she could have tried to get you for defamation of character considering everything you’ve said about her. But paint you as a sexual predator? Please, just because she’s frigid and could never fuck her ex like you do!”

People are assholes take #1,342,209. No, not really. But that’s how many hits you get if you look up, “I hate you” on Google Blogs.

Who hasn’t ranted about an ex, an ex’s ex, a colleague, a sibling, a parent, a spouse, a boss, a client, a neighbor, a friend, a foe, the government? A blog is a cache of personal stories and people who piss us off are a real part of life.

And so we blog. Usually, it’s reactionary. Something hurts us, we blog and we let it go. But every once in a while you have the case of someone who can’t let it go. Anger becomes vendetta and they begin to dedicate a significant part of their lives to the destruction of someone they once called a friend.

My friend Atherton Bartelby, a Honolulu-based graphic designer, was BFF with a sport commentatrix based in the East Coast whom we’ll call Jackie. I use the past tense because they no longer talk. In fact, they hate each other. What happened? She was flying him out to the mainland for a get together and he stood her up. He said it was work-related. She said he was too drunk to find the airport.

That was just the beginning. For months, Jackie aired all of Bartelby’s dirty laundry on her blog. I don’t know how much of it was true, but from his taxes to alleged medical conditions, it was all right there, just a Google search away.

It was so messy and shame-attack inducing, Bartelby almost quit blogging. He came back, but like a pariah run out of town, he was forced to start from scratch and set up camp at a completely different blogging platform.

PACK OF HATERS

“Behind every success is a pack of haters,” goes the Lil Beck song, but in the microfame game, success is not required. Behind every blog post and tweet and utter and comment is a pack of haters.

“Today the blogosphere is so charged, so polarized, and so filled with haters hating that it’s simply not worth it.” Calacanis wrote in his retirement blog post.

The haters wasted no time responding: “Great news! Twitter will be a much better and less trafficked site now!”, “You had a blog?”, “Wait, you weren’t retired?”

We developed the Gestalt effect as a survival mechanism to visually recognize the whole form of a predator in the wild from an incomplete collection of lines and shapes. Will we in time develop a new mechanism to somehow avoid the frequent acts of random violence that we experience online now?

I remember the first time someone tore me a new one in a comment, completely unprovoked. I don’t remember who it was or what they said, but I will never forget how I felt: it was somewhere between shame and panic. I couldn’t understand it—why would a stranger feel compelled to be so mean to me?

The answer is that they don’t need a reason. The second you put yourself online, you turn yourself into an target.

DON’T READ THE COMMENTS

“You really shouldn’t read the comments,” was the first piece of advice that Emily Gould received when she started working at Gawker, a snarky gossip and entertainment blog about the media.

She disobeyed. It’s hard not to.

“I once received ‘Go back to Toronto!’ as a comment on my shitty editing skills when I turned down a supposedly widely-published author—who also supposedly fucked Bukowski’s sloppy seconds, as if that’s a claim to writing fame!” Laura Roberts, editor of the literary smut magazine Black Heart Magazine tells me.

I can’t see anyone hating on the funny, bodacious Roberts. I begin asking everyone I know with an online presence whether they’ve received mean comments from strangers.

“Yeah,” journalist and former relationship columnist Matt Katz confirms. He’s been blogging for a year about his engagement. “It was from a Malawian living in England. He said, ‘you live in a country where men get shit on their penises and you defend it’ and whatnot. I deleted it.”

Digital girl and media maven Julia Roy linked me to a post on her blog about a troll she contracted via the popular micro-blogging platform, Twitter. Across her timeline, Roy’s been a dick tease, a dumb bitch, a lying ass bitch, and a “hoe ass.” And, no, I don’t know what that is, either.

“You’ve received your share of nasty comments—what’s the worst?” I ask Emily Gould.

“Ha!” she replies. “Um, at this point it all kind of blurs together.”

THE INTERNET WON’T MAKE UP FOR WHAT HAPPENED IN HIGH SCHOOL

That’s what blogger Meg Fowler’s shirts over at Cafepress say. According to her, it’s a desire to compensate for loserdom experienced in high school that makes people mean online.

Everyone is shot back to the put someone down or be put down mentality that makes high school so brutal. Add anonymity to this equation and the potential for serious assholism is exponential.

“I’m not naive enough to think that anyone will ever wrangle all the assholes into submission and calm the Internet into a state of semi-grace,” says Fowler. But she’s put her two cents out there in an often-Digged post titled How Not To Be An Asshole Or Encourage Assholism On The Internet.

“At the end of the day, everyone will lose their temper now and again, and write something that embarrasses them. It’s just a matter of not making it a lifestyle choice,” she writes. “If you’ve been an asshole, apologize, and let it go. If the person ignores you, you did your part. You can’t make them love you, as Bonnie Raitt says.”

LIFE AFTER WEBSECUTION

“If I were going to completely disavow self-scrutiny and unedited opinion-broadcasting, it would mean the end of my life as a blogger,” wrote Gould in her piece on blogging for the New York Times Magazine. “I still have Emily Magazine as a place to spew when I need to. It will never again be the friendly place that it was in 2004—there are plenty of negative comments now, and I don’t delete them. I still think about closing the door to my online life and locking them out, but then I think of everything else I’d be locking out, and I leave it open.”

As of today, Gould has reinstated comments on her blog after two weeks without that function on her posts. Will her commenters reform and learn to play nice?

Will any of us learn to play nice?

Ian McEwan, author of Atonement and ex-husband to a woman who made a circus of the disintegration of their marriage online, said it best, “Cruelty is a failure of imagination.”

Let’s be more creative.

pass it on!
[del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [kirtsy] [Ma.gnolia] [Mixx] [Propeller] [Reddit] [Slashdot] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Email] More »

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
1 Comment Comments



  • AV Flox writes about web culture; new media’s gradual overthrow of old media; trends in social media; and the complicated entanglements people get themselves into as we venture forth into this new world where, more and more, the analog is colliding with the digital.

  • Hosted by: