Let a thousand Britneys bloom

Brevity certainly is not the soul of wit chez Jason Chervokas and Tom Watson, the former @NewYork columnists now kicked upstairs to Inside.

After wading through the duo’s missive on celebrities’ tightarsed “official” sites, we found the only real point:

The real case against BritneySpears.com is its vapidity, and we don’t just mean that as a reflection of its subject’s music. Like dozens of other “celebrityname.com” sites, it makes the assumption that modern fans will take what you give them, that they’re interested in the company line – the official bio, the package. They are, of course, but their interest goes deeper these days for one compelling reason: they have the power. The Internet is not a mass medium. It is a medium of the masses, and even the most controlled and packaged star cannot control it.

So how are we supposed to square this with celebrities’ brave efforts to “recover” their domain names from “cybersquatters”? Even Jeanette Winterson, in (again) Brill’s Content (again, not online), whines for pages and pages and pages about how “He Stole My Name.”

Are we for central celebrity control or not?

We suppose we support celebrities’ “right” to secure “their own names,” despite the fact that civilians with equal names tend to lose such fights. (Explication.) A really smart celebrity site would do the following:

Act as something of a portal for all information about the celebrity. Link to, annotate, and rate all the fan sites.
Provide a sanctioned Weblog where registered fans could upload news and links, as opposed to those very productive and substantive “Britney sucks!”/“Britney rules!” remarks.
Have the celebrities answer their own damn E-mail – from owners of fan sites, if not absolutely everyone in the world. If you run the best Britney Spears fan site in Italy, you should be able to ask Britney what size her tap shoes are and get a real response. PGP encryption would be quite sufficient to prove who’s who.
Provide the fan sites with different exclusive features. Maybe the Italians could use a nice letter reminiscing about her shopping tour of Milan.
Actually read the user-contributed bibliographic and discographic data (“discographic”: such a lovely word) that fan sites adore and:
1. provide annotations (“I wasn’t quite sure how Cannibal Corpse could possibly remix ‘Hit Me,’ but they did it, and it burned up the charts in Belgium”)
2. take the information seriously enough to correct errors
3. conversely, use the information as a sort of distributed database and auxiliary brain, since, after 80 shows, you are going to forget which concert it was where your left stocking was three inches lower than your right (Rome or Milan? nope, Calgary)

It really kills us to admit this, but AOL and the Amerikanski version of Big Brother avidly “embraced” and promoted fan Web sites. In fact, we’re working on an extended E-interview with some fan-site owners – from other disciplines – that will probably raise a few brows.

Posted on 2000-10-28