The Star System

High profile bloggers, floggers and vloggers continue to "make news" merely with a shift in their presence. Only this time that presence is largely virtual and their audience is only a subset of the greater populace at large.

The concentration of notice that blogging stars are garnering -- in what curmudgeonly, computer journalists call the "attention space" -- seems peculiarly American. If media is going to be so different this time then why do we need stars? Why is this revolution so different from motion pictures or radio or TV?

I was reminded of this while listening to this extraordinary edition of This Week in Tech from Leo Laporte. Leo is a great broadcaster; however TWIT 57 is chaotically awful. Cheers to Leo for putting it out. I stopped listening somewhere around 20 to 25 minutes into it and moved on to some IT Conversations stuff. Listeners have complained about the sound quality (Leo has offered the raw mixes of each participant to the web at large for a remix) unfortunately the show was not about sound quality but sound quantity. You either yelled like a Calcanis or you needed to be obsequiously turtle-necky.

While computer media needs to be contrarily compelling, it needs to be more a show case for the art of humanity than a yell-festing spectacle in some uber-retail megastore. Americans have Fox News to void that fill. I think in his heart Leo probably understands that. Still, spectacle assuages ego much more than community and so we experience this "look at me" thing over and over and over. The best computer media is that pass-around, viral stuff -- not the star-building wannabe rocket-booming stuff. If I want to watch John Stewart or Samantha Bee, I'll just turn on John Stewart or Samantha Bee.