Orson chuckles heartily

[imomus]

My Wired column today is about certain developments -- like YouTube's promise to share advertising revenue with video creators very shortly -- which make it more and more difficult to tell who's a "real person" online and who's selling you something, whether an actual brand or themselves-as-brand. Because, with advertisers abandoning the $74 billion TV ad industry (where ads are just too obvious to get anyone's attention) and spending their money much more furtively and covertly online basically wherever amateurs are capturing large audiences, we enter a hall of mirrors.



YouTube's founders "are open to anything, including user-generated ads, behind-the-scenes ad footage, sponsored vlogs and event marketing shoots at film festivals". And when they start paying, any of us who vlog will be vlogging for cash, and flogging -- well, who knows what? Maybe just ourselves, maybe cars and exercise machines. It's something deeply American, something P.T. Barnum and Orson Welles and Jeff Koons and Lord Breaulove Swells Whimsy understand intimately. It's something I understand myself, for heaven's sake, after a lifetime of self-performance and self-promotion. And I'm not so rockist as to want to condemn it. But sometimes, when I'm watching people onYouTube, I wonder who's "real". Is Lucymisser real? Is Cutiemish? What about me, what about Marxy? An ILX thread recently accused us both of being viral marketing. This was a board I frequented for five years, and yet in all that time I wasn't able to persuade them that I was real.

Anyway, I'm proud to have got Whimsy onto the cover of Wired. Whatever he's selling.

Here, meanwhile, is the important part of today's missive. The self-promotion. I'm going to my sister's wedding in Scotland next weekend and yesterday Hisae and I went out and spent some money at the Indian shops on the Karl-Marx-Strasse. Here's how it looked!



Really, what to do? Because wearing clothes is self-promotion, but going naked is, as we saw yesterday, even more blatant self-promotion! Where is Orson Welles when we need him to explain it all? Or at least... chuckle heartily, shot in a mirror.

[Error: unknown template video]

Comments

[fishwithissues.livejournal.com]

the stealth market-minded "are-you-real" question is so loaded and unknowable I always just assume the random internet hello is selling something unless it's a friend, and even then there can be ambiguity....

Relatededly, I sometimes like to make real, fake, unsolicited, and unnecessary plugs for products I actually like. it's one thing to pretend to love consumer trash; it's much weirder, more interesting, and difficult for me to try to deal appropriately with the oddly "real" affinity I sometimes have for mass merchandise/entertainment.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You know, I wrote the article just after watching your video of the sakura event, and your interview with the walking art gallery girl. She seemed the essence of the "problem" -- total full-on self-promotion, yet not for anyone corporate, just for her own eccentric project. And to meet people. And to live interestingly. It seems very New York, somehow. Everyone ready with their card and their URL. I'm not sure how I feel about it. After a few months in New York you either become like them, or leave to find "real people" somewhere else.

[fishwithissues.livejournal.com]

Ha, it's funny the idea that having a url would be something specific to a region. Wasn't the last thing you said in that video interview "check out the blog"? Maybe it was just edited that way :)

I did want to emphasize with that conversation how awkward it always is to try to work a url into casual conversation. "Is that a hyphen or an underscore?" Gah, gigabytes, everywhere!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Wasn't the last thing you said in that video interview "check out the blog"?

Yes, and I come under the definition of "people who've spent more than a few months in New York, and become like them"!

[fishwithissues.livejournal.com]

Go self-promotion go! My watch plays videos!