Twitter and Accessibility: Smart Cooking or a Recipe for Disaster?

Currently, this year’s crop of American Idol contestants are on their national summer tour, which gives fans the opportunity to see their favorites perform live. Of course, for many, the tour also is a chance to do some good old fashioned “bus stalking” with the hopes of getting a picture or autograph with a particular idol before the show. This has gone on for years, ever since the first tour commenced. That’s nothing new.

What is new, though, is Twitter…and it’s provided fans with a whole other level of accessibility – virtual and otherwise. It seems that many of this year’s contestants are Twitter-a-holics – providing frequent updates from the front lines of the tour; offering up commentary on the show as they wait their turn to go onstage; providing some Q&A sessions to relieve boredom; recording “Bubble Tweet” videos of behind-the-scenes, backstage antics, etc.

What is most interesting, though, is the way that fans – and some contestants themselves – are using this social media to arrange pre/post show meetings. A friend of mine is a fan of Danny Gokey; she said that early on in the tour, fans began to “tweet” him the name/s of particular fans who would be at that night’s show – sometimes along with their phone numbers – so that he would be sure to meet them and look for them by name prior to the show at the buses.

While this sounded like a gimmick…Gokey actually has been complying, coming out before most shows with the list of fans in tow.  It’s all been very innocent, and in some ways, it’s really amazing that he’s gone this extra effort to connect with and please his fans. When one fan who didn’t get to meet him (despite the usual round of Tweet requests) reported her frustration and sadness, he directly contacted her on Twitter, telling her how sorry he was that they hadn’t met up and that he had attempted to find her but couldn’t. Enabled by Twitter, Gokey is setting the bar fairly high in terms of contact and accessibility. Perhaps it’s still a novelty to him, and from all indications, he has a gregarious personality and truly does enjoy meeting people who have come to the show primarily to see him. It’s in his nature.

Yet this sort of accessibility also seems to be a slippery slope, and he’d be wise, perhaps, to speak to Season 5 contestant Ace Young – someone else who set the bar so high with fans that in the end, it may have been impossibly high.

While back in 2006, Ace and his fans didn’t have the advantage of Twitter, they used MySpace to its full effect to try to meet him, arrange pre-show pics, get backstage passes, etc. And like Danny Gokey, Ace was only too eager to please most of the time. He always came out before each show on the Idol tour to sign autographs, talk to fans, and share some insights about the tour. He would sing to children, give long, sincere hugs to anyone who offered (and even those who didn’t!), and seemed to enjoy each second of it. He also let particular fans backstage and gave them VIP access…for no reason other than that they had been loyal. It was never a sexual thing on Ace’s part.

After the tour ended, though, it became clear that when fans went to any of Ace’s concerts or appearances, they had expectations that always included the same one-on-one time he had given people on the Idol tour. Many fans thought nothing of driving hours to see him perform one or two songs and then camp out in his hotel lobby for hours…because they knew, despite the invasive behavior, that he’d meet with them at some point and say hello. Simply put: to go to an Ace event without getting personal time with him was not deemed as a “success” by many fans.

Furthermore, fans who went to multiple events, who collected many of these face-to-face moments with him, started to view themselves not just as fans, but as friends. They expected special treatment and pay-off for their loyalty. Ace soon set up a system where he couldn’t win. For example, if a fan sent him a request to wish another fan a happy birthday and he did, if he ever again missed ONE of these requests, he heard about it. If he hung out with some fans after his Broadway performance on Grease and other fans heard about it after the fact, he caught grief. If he responded to some fans’ personal messages to him and not others, he was accused of playing favorites.

While I don’t follow Ace much these days, I’ve heard that over the past year or so, he’s retreated from fans. Partly this may be because he’s newly engaged and trying to carve out a personal life for himself that is separate from his professional one. But, there seems to be more going on.

 He simply stopped responding to fan messages and eventually cancelled both his Facebook account and shut down his official website. Many of his fans were hurt and puzzled – it was as if he was an entirely different person than the accessible, affable guy they’d come to know and rely on to “always be there.” But so it was. Some fans who had considered themselves “friends” learned the hard lesson that maybe they never really were….and, of course, this lesson was difficult to swallow.

In an effort to please everyone, Ace ended up feeding a beast that, in the end, seemed to destroy his best efforts. None of the contestants who go on Idol are equipped to deal with instant fame and the complexities of fandom – it seems that they should be schooled in this somehow. Too much accessibility breeds entitlement, but it can be difficult to know where to draw the line and it’s perhaps difficult to foresee how the bar you set at the beginning will have consequences for later on.

AI and “Authentic Self”?

Over the years as I’ve followed stories related to American Idol and participated in a few AI-related fandoms, one subject that comes up time and time again involves a given contestant’s “true self” or “true motivation.”

There is always a lot of discussion as to whether the show allows contestants to exhibit their authentic self and whether the “self” depicted on the show was in some ways a creation meant to dupe fans or get votes. Often, and I’ve seen this with several former AI participants, the current choices or professional/personal lifestyle of a contestant is held up against the persona portrayed on the show itself – and this disconnect is often studied, analyzed, and critiqued to death. Why? Well, the analytical exercise itself, I suppose, is somewhat interesting.

But largely this critique is done to suggest some sort of duplicity on the part of the contestant – that he/she played some sort of bait and switch game with the public; that there was overt manipulation involved; or that the contestant was merely using fans to achieve an end, and it was all quite calculated.

When fans invest money and/or emotional energy into a contestant and that contestant then goes on to make choices that disappoint and confuse, it’s easy to assume that one was, indeed, manipulated or duped. Yet, the more I study and participate in fandom and follow the career trajectory of AI contestants, the less certain I am about the manipulation angle.

To assume that someone deliberately set out to dupe or manipulate assumes some sort of concrete plan or unwavering sense of self. For underneath the surface of critiques about contestants losing direction or becoming something “they’re not,” lies a belief that the contestants knew exactly who they were in the first place – that the entire process of being on the show and the aftermath that followed didn’t alter them in significant ways – both personally and professionally.

It’s my bet that when most of these contestants audition for the show, it’s not because they’re in a great place; some do it on a whim, of course, but for others, it’s kind of a last chance to get exposure – a last shot to see if they have what it takes before pursuing a “safer” route (going back to college, pursuing a 9 to 5 job, etc.). How can the average contestant who shows up as one of THOUSANDS, possibly be prepared for all the myriad of opportunities and offers that will come their way if they are lucky enough to break the odds and make it into the public eye?

And how can these opportunities not change them – maybe not the moral and ethical foundation of who they are, but certainly it can change the scope of their professional identity and personal aspirations.

What makes it confusing sometimes, I think, is that the contestants themselves – while dealing with the machinations and aftermath of Idol – may not recognize the extent to which they are changing. They may, in fact, be insistent that they haven’t changed – that the chaos surrounding them hasn’t made any significant impact. They may not also recognize – at least initially — that random comments they make to interviewers or reporters are taken as gospel truth by fans; a sentence or phrase they may have uttered non-reflectively (about the type of music they wish to create, the type of person they are, etc., etc.) can later come to haunt them and be held up as some definitive statement of who they WERE and how they’ve since abandoned that better self.

Fans often acknowledge, of course, that a single performance or interview can’t paint the whole story – that there is much more that goes on behind the scenes that the public isn’t privy to – but quotes and performances from said interviews and concerts – are nonetheless often put forward as representations of “truth” or “authenticity.”

It’s natural, I think, that fans project their own desires and dreams on contestants – to follow a certain career path against other options or to embrace a certain genre of music more than another. And often, fans don’t necessarily “get” the choices that contestants make which results in (often significant) letdown. But the argument that a contestant’s choices represent a selling out or break from a true self – that’s an argument I’m much less comfortable making.

What’s with all the hate? Good question.

This year on Idol I rooted for Danny Gokey – however, not everyone did, as evidenced by articles such as, “Why Do People Hate Danny Gokey?” or blogs which spoke of wanting him to die an excrutiatingly slow death. My friend, who became quite passionate about Gokey as a contestant (more than I did), wondered why, indeed, Gokey became such a polarizing figure and why it was okay to openly hate and mock him – especially those jabs that suggested he was using his wife’s recent death to “score points” with viewers. Here’s an excerpt from the aforementioned blog:

Then I realized that your dead-wife backstory was keeping your dreams alive. Then I realized that you were kind of a dick, the sort of dude I’ve come across time and again in life, convinced that doggone, you’re a good person and people like you – when, in fact, everybody sort of wishes you’d die a slow and painful death in the intestines of some gruesome creature.

Of course, on a show like AI, you can replace the narrative about Gokey with other contestants as well. Certainly, you could find similar ire directed at just about anyone who has graced the Idol stage in the past 8 years – both winners and losers. While some contestants seem to inspire more vitriol and hate than others, it often seems that those who inspire the most hate also inspire the most loyalty and have the most enthusiastic and fervent followings, too – both ends of the spectrum are emotionally charged, and no doubt, one end fuels and feeds off the other. Yet, the question still remains…why all the hate?

It’s an interesting question. Unlike most other reality shows, even ones where people are voted off weekly, AI provides very little in the way of “behind the scenes” material or confessionals. After the final 12 have been chosen, we aren’t privy to backstage banter or footage of one contestant bitching about another or saying disparaging things about the show or one of their fellow competitors. We have very little to go upon and yet, people still develop very strong feelings about the contestants, feelings that stretch far beyond their given performance each week and feelings that seem based on a projection of character – e.g., what this individual must be like off-stage; what he must be thinking/feeling, what his wardrobe says about him as a human being, and what his random comments to the judges reflect about his inner character and goodness.

It seems that part of the fandom experience of Idol might be to create caricatures of each contestant based on the little information we’re given as viewers; within a fandom it’s natural to create narratives to pit some of these caricatures against one another and stand some in alliance. “Danny sat next to Allison at elimination last night? Wow…they seem really close.” Or “Did you see that look Adam gave Paula? What an ungrateful bastard. Who does he think he is? He doesn’t smile at the judges in the humble way that Kris does.” All of this is made up for the sake of example, but you get the drift.

In my experience as a fan of the show, it’s rare to passionately follow and support one contestant without developing an equal disdain for another. And yet….when it comes right down to it, this disdain, I think, is rarely directed at the person him/herself, but based on a character sketch of that person – pieced together by the sound-bit pastiche of interviews, performances, banter with the judges, song choice, and other rather superficial elements of the show.

The problem with reality TV, and especially Idol – where fans have so much control on the outcome of the show – is that the distinction between “real person” and “TV character” is blurred and conflated to the point that fans often think they “know” a contestant based primarily by the images and sound bites that stream from their television.  And, often, fairly or not, this sound bite character sketch stays with a contestant and defines that contestant’s public image and perception, long after the show has ended.

While contestants on Idol aren’t actors per se, we get to know them through a very limited means and certainly what is presented to us is in no way shape or form the entire picture. So fans and critics alike fill in the blank and project in ways they wouldn’t if they were watching a fictional TV drama. I’m a big fan of the classic TV show Dallas; now, clearly, fans LOVED to hate J.R. Ewing, but they didn’t dream of projecting this same hate onto Larry Hagman himself. It’s obviously not as easy to make this separation on a show like Idol.

I’d like to believe that when a blogger writes about wanting an Idol contestant to die a slow excrutiating death, that he’s talking about his reaction to a televisual caricature, not an actual person – but it’s not that simple or clear cut in “Idol land.” Things seldom are.

Just Because

Because I just love everything about this song…lyrics, melody, kitchy video….perfection.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Oec8RuwVVs

One reason why I can’t do another fandom…

Gotta love it…

The Lure of Fandom: One Stop Shopping or Shop Till You Drop?

Over the past few years, I’ve talked to quite a few people who have become part of various fandoms; one issue that intrigues me is how, why, or whether or not, people become involved in multiple fandoms.

A long while back, when I shifted my own fandom allegiance from one AI contestant to another, someone made an interesting comment to me.  She said, “Well, it doesn’t really matter who you’re following or rooting for, as long as the feeling doesn’t end.”  It was strange, but she didn’t even have to describe the feeling she was referring to; I knew exactly what she was saying and why.  There’s a heady rush associated with fandom – at least in the early stages – that is fairly intoxicating and for some, addicting. 

And yet, for me, this heady rush eventually played itself out with both fandoms; perhaps I was too fickle, I’m not sure.  While I still participate in one fandom, and have made some great friends along the way, I know that this is my last “go round” so to speak.  I’m not going to be venturing into any new online communities or fan groups anytime soon.

Now, I’ve told this to people and some people “get it”; they, too, know that it’s not going to happen again for them.  Others, though, say things like, “Well, never say never.”  Or, “You can’t predict that it won’t happen again.”  The implication of these latter comments seems to be that becoming a fanatic or a hard core fan and becoming immersed in a fandom isn’t a choice, but something beyond our control – that the heady rush that we once experienced is so powerful that it cannot be resisted.  I hear the same arguments made about why people can’t LEAVE fandom – that something undefinable keeps pulling them back into the fray.

The trouble is, I think for me, at least, the “heady rush” wasn’t quite as much about the performer or celeb, as it was about the whole novelty of fandom itself – a novelty and fascination born out of my own naivete and inexperience in fan communities. 

So, I want to ask others….if you’re currently part of a fandom, is this IT for you and why?  Do you feel like it was simply a conscientious CHOICE to become involved in fandom or did you feel that something greater was at play?  Have you resisted joining other fandoms?  Again, why?

The Power of Song

Like certain scents and old photographs, music has the ability to transport us back to particular moments – sometimes with powerful force and plenty of sensory detail.  For example, whenever I hear George Michael’s “One Last Try,” I’m immediately back in my high school lunch room’s converted dance floor dancing with Justin D.; it’s dark, and the red and blue spotlights circling the floor almost make the folded lunch tables disappear against the walls.  I gaze at my shoes, as we, as typical at most junior high dances, awkwardly rock back in forth to the music, my hands placed gingerly on his shoulders and his around my waist…with about enough room between us for another human being – or at least a lot of teenage angst and tension.  One song takes me there every time…whether or not I want to go there… While some music transports you, there is some that seems to do almost more than that; it’s difficult to put into words, but I guess the closest I can figure it, is that some music…well, it feels like home.  Even if, or perhaps especially if, you ever find yourself in a place that is lonely, far away, or foreign. I found myself in such a place on July 4, 1998.  It was the summer after my first year in grad school and I found myself all alone in my little apartment in Milwaukee.  I’ve always been somewhat of a “tough cookie,” but my first year of graduate school had been especially trying.  While, technically, I was just 6 hours from my parents and my childhood home in MN, I felt far enough away that I could have been just about anywhere.  As a 23-year old rookie Master’s student enrolled in classes with students finishing up their Ph.D.’s, I often felt intimidated, like a fish out of water.  I never realized how much of my identity had been wrapped up in being a “good student” until I started my graduate work.  This identity got turned on its head this first year and I realized that I would have to overcome a steep learning curve if I was going to succeed and last another 7 years on the long and winding road to obtain my doctorate.  What was worse, though, was that many of the students at Milwaukee weren’t exactly, well…they weren’t exactly “fun” (yes, I know that is a subjective term, but you could have applied just about any brand of subjectivity you wanted to and defining my classmates as “fun” would still have been a stretch).  Of course, after hitting the books, I had precious little time to socialize anyway, so I made pretty good friends with my cozy little apartment that year, and the Starbucks around the corner.  Thankfully, I’m quite content spending time alone and it probably was necessary to get through that first year.  I had no idea back then that graduate school would eventually get easier and that my social life would improve dramatically in the coming years. But on that 4th of July day back in 1998, I realized that with no classes and no friends in town, I was terribly lonely.  The thought of spending the entire day in my apartment just didn’t seem to be a good option.  Bored, I turned on the radio and heard an advertisement for Summerfest, which I had heard was a really “big deal” each year in Milwaukee – it was the place to go if you liked beer, music, beer, and more beer.  J  The radio DJ mentioned that there were still tickets left that night to see James Taylor in the main outdoor amphitheater. Perhaps it was the lovely weather or just my inability to be alone one second longer, but something possessed me to drive myself down to the Summerfest grounds, buy a ticket, and head to the show.  I had never gone to a concert alone in my whole life – but the ticket was only $9.00 and the day was giving way to a beautiful, cool summer evening, so I just held my head up high and found a spot on the bleachers, not terribly far away from the stage. I had never been a huge James Taylor fan, but I knew his music well, and I suppose that subconsciously I found the idea of the concert as comforting as many of Taylor’s greatest hits. Something interesting occurs when you attend a concert alone – you focus more than you would otherwise on the performer, the stage, the music….you take everything in and silently reflect – on each song, each lyric, each chord, each instrument.  That night, everything else around me disappeared except what was happening on stage.  Taylor sang his classic songs and some I hadn’t heard before, but liked a great deal.  He breezily worked his way through hits such as “Handyman,” “You’ve Got a Friend,” “Fire and Rain,” and “Your Smiling Face.” He’s an effortless performer and doesn’t rely on gimmicks — he doesn’t have to.  There’s an openness and honesty in his music that allows it, like a fine wine, to age and mature beautifully with time. Long after the sun had descended below the horizon and Taylor had taken his final bows with his band, I realized that it was time to go home to my little one-bedroom sanctuary.  As I got up to leave, however, my attention was forced back to the stage as Taylor walked back silently, carrying only his acoustic guitar, and perched himself on top of a solitary stool – surrounded only by the soft glow of spotlight.  You could have heard a pin drop as he began strumming the first few lines of “Sweet Baby James.”  I sat back down and became transfixed by his guitar playing and the words to this simple lullaby song that he had written ages ago for his nephew James.  There is a young cowboy he lives on the range His horse and his cattle are his only companions He works in the saddle and he sleeps in the canyons Waiting for summer, his pastures to change And as the moon rises he sits by his fire Thinking about women and glasses of beer And closing his eyes as the doggies retire He sings out a song which is soft but it’s clear As if maybe someone could hear Goodnight you moonlight ladies Rockabye sweet baby james Deep greens and blues are the colors I choose Won’t you let me go down in my dreams And rockabye sweet baby James Now the first of December was covered with snow And so was the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston Lord, the Berkshires seemed dream-like on account of that frosting With ten miles behind me and ten thousand more to go There’s a song that they sing when they take to the highway A song that they sing when they take to the sea A song that they sing of their home in the sky Maybe you can believe it if it helps you to sleep But singing works just fine for me   As he sang, I looked up at the clear night sky, which was carpeted in stars – a rare sight to behold in the city.  The words to the song brought me peace…and interestingly, strength.  I don’t know why or how, but in that moment, I knew everything was going to be alright – I was going to be okay here in Milwaukee and I was going to make it just fine through graduate school.  And, you know what?  I did.  So, what about for you?  Is there a song that “takes you there” every time you hear it?  Is there a song, that either in a small or significant way, transformed your life?

Hmm…it’s probably a good thing that hardly anyone reads my blog…

This is amusing.

http://gawker.com/5198280/warning-blog-comments-may-lead-to-blog-sex

The soundtrack to online fandom??

 

That’s mine…what’s yours?

On Blogging and Net-O-Riety in Fan Communities

Having studied and participated, over the past few years, in several message boards and blogs, I’ve been fascinated as to what exactly holds these online fan communities together….especially over long periods of time.

Obviously, when it comes to what these boards and blogs are all “about,” the artist is the primary answer.  As I’ve discussed in previous blogs, over time, the subject of the boards becomes just as much about the community and friendships that have formed via these online connections as it is the artist himself.  

However, where these boards and communities tend to lose focus and sometimes implode, is when the primary “subject” of the boards – or what these boards/blogs become “about” – goes from the artist or fan community to a handful of individual posters, or the blogger himself.  Certainly this latter scenario was the case with, perhaps, the most influential blog for X – a blog that, like the blogger himself, took on a life of its own and is still mythologized today within X’s fan community.

This blog helped shape and brand X in important ways, and for a while, did an impressive job of galvanizing his fan base.  In the beginning it seemed that the blogger – I’ll just call him (lowercase) x because he did after all go by a nickname of X – wanted to create a sense of mystery about who he was, what his motives were, and how he was connected to X in the first place.  A good marketing tactic?  Surely.  It created added intrigue about the blog, and at the same time protected the real identity of the blogger, too…something, that, of course, was his right to protect. 

Intrigue, though, is an interesting beast; it’s fueled by the suspicion that there’s something more about a particular person or situation than meets the eye – and yet often at the end of this rainbow of suspicion lies not pot of gold, but a funhouse full of (smoke and) mirrors.  In the case of x, I think that in reality, he was caught somewhere between the pot of gold and the funhouse.  The pot of gold, was, of course, his direct connection to X, and the accompanying belief that X regularly read (and perhaps was influenced by) the blog and endorsed the fan opinions and overall ethos of this virtual community.  As a result, after a while, some posters began to see x as a direct pipeline to X and it was sometimes hard to know where x started and X stopped.  However, what one did know, was that in the context of all things “X” and the world that surrounded him, “x” became a celebrity in his own right.

In Jennifer Howard’s Washington Post essay, “It’s a Little Too Cozy in the Blogosphere,” she argues that one of the most annoying quality of blogs, despite their proposed democratic tendencies, is that blogging is often a “popularity contest in which the value of information is confused with the cool quotient of the person spreading it.”  She argues that “the cult of media celebrity hasn’t been broken by the Internet’s democratic tendencies; it’s just found new enabling technology.” Certainly, Coleman’s critique seems to apply to the phenomenon of x’s blog.  Yet for all the power a bloggist may have among his readers, aka “followers,” this power can often just feel like pressure.  In fact, at one point, x surprised everyone by temporarily shutting down his still popular site because he felt like it had taken on a life of his own and he could no longer keep up or keep his sanity.  

It seemed that as  X’s AND  x’s popularity jointly exploded, the site, itself, began to implode.  In his justification to fans for closing his site, x wrote: “I’m like an addict here.  I think about [the site] all the time.  What should I post next?  What’s the next theme?  What great song or artist should I introduce?  Who should I e-mail?  Who did I accidentally piss off today?”  Clearly, in terms of time, attention, and flat-out energy, it seemed to be getting difficult for x  to reconcile his two identities….an unassuming  professional and family man by day, and a brash, ultra-cool, smart/hip blogger by night.  Interestingly, the fact that x never attempted to reconcile these identities and tried to retain some “real life” anonymity only fueled his online celebrity. 

When a message board or blog becomes more about the bloggist or select posters more than anything else, the power dynamics shift and the community feels less like a democracy, open to the free exchange of ideas, and more like a kingdom, where the reigning principle is pleasing the prince (aka “kissing ass”).  Of course, this problem can be compounded with blogs, that tend to be less democratic by nature anyway, given their narrower scope and design as personal forums for one individual’s (the blogger’s) opinions.

Unfortunately, once the implicit mission of any board becomes to please the prince, groupthink tends to take over.  Groupthink is dangerous to online communities in that it halts discussion and critique.  Instead of adding substantial insight, debate, or even disagreement regarding an initial idea, you begin to see more and more threads with strings of responses that consist of little more than: “Right on!”; “I couldn’t agree more”; “You ROCK!”; or “I always love how you think!!” Even posts that are more substantial in nature than the previous examples often seem to become cookie cutter and cliched.

 Not only do such responses halt discussion or analysis, they erode the identity of the community, too.  In short, since these communities are largely formed through discourse, when the discourse gets reduced to predictably pretentious posts that curry the favor of the bloggist OR to one-line agreements and exclamations of praise, the community’s significance or interest-factor is diminished.

Finally, once online communities become too insular and too full of inside jokes and attempts to kiss the asses of a select group of individuals (the blogger most particularly), these communities – even if inadvertently – cease to become welcoming to new members.  New posters feel as if they must first navigate the web of relationships and power structures within a particular board before they dare contribute.  And, of course, once groupthink has taken over a board, it’s harder for new posters to be acknowledged or heard….lest they adopt the same generic approach they see modeled by others on the board.

I wonder sometimes if online fan communities are meant to have a long shelf life.  Perhaps it is inevitable for personalities to take over and for discussion to become stagnant and stifled.  Perhaps in the end, these communities just play themselves out, even if the friendships formed through these boards/blogs, do not.

I have a lot more to say about this topic…but I’ve rambled on more than enough here for now.  Thoughts on this subject?