Aimee Goldblum
With Niko Omilana and George Clarke taking to our TV screens this autumn, celebrity status is once again called into question – who counts as a celebrity? Omilana, famous for his prank YouTube channel, but perhaps more importantly, running for Mayor of London, stars in the first season of Celebrity Traitors as the only online personality in the castle. Clarke, mainly famous for his TikTok videos, is competing in this year’s Strictly Come Dancing, and is actually quite talented.
The clearest sign of the death of monoculture – that is, unifying pop culture experiences – is the casts of celebrity reality TV shows. Every year, I recognise about two people from Strictly Come Dancing, and I’m sure others are the same. They may recognise two different people, of course, but two, nonetheless. Obviously, monoculture is not completely gone. People like Taylor Swift and TV shows like Severance or Traitors have captured the cultural zeitgeist, but even these phenomena don’t have the same stretch as pop culture of decades past.
There are two reasons for this: firstly, there are simply more celebrities now than there once were. There are more films, shows, and music, made and distributed, as access widens and demand increases. Therefore, there are more actors, musicians, and now, to the concern of some, internet personalities, that harbour the same levels of success as Britney Spears did in the 2000s. But if they are so famous, why don’t we know who any of them are? Taking a look at the Billboard top 20, not only have I not heard of most of the artists, I haven’t even heard the songs themselves. Sure, multiple one-hit-wonders littered across pre-internet charts. In these cases, however, their music was heard by the masses on MTV or the radio. Now, it is possible for a song to rack up millions of streams with most of the population being unfamiliar.
The inception of the internet was fractured, with hundreds of different websites popping up for the same purpose. There weren’t any big players to compete with. Eventually, this was narrowed down. If you wanted to look something up, you’d go to Google. If you wanted to post a photo of your breakfast with a sepia filter, you’d go to Instagram. And if you wanted to see the kinds of current events that would be discussed on the Ellen Show, you’d go to Twitter. I’d argue that the internet has become fractured once more. We use these same sites, but they have become so massive that it is entirely possible to use them without ever interacting with massive communities of thousands of people, or even without knowing of them at all. Hence, the new ‘unknown’ celebrity. That random singer you’ve never heard of on Strictly has thousands of fans, but they exist on an entirely different plane to you.
UK celebrity reality TV has never exactly featured A-Listers, of course, with casts often rotating between different minor actors from Emmerdale or Eastenders. But there’s a specific outrage over online celebrities, most often YouTubers, taking up these slots. But how different are these people from ‘regular’ celebrities? YouTube is a creative platform showcasing creative individuals, just as the film or music industries are. And these creators are often more famous than the other B-Listers they’ll star alongside, just to a different, younger target audience. Considering the steady decline in viewer numbers for reality TV since the 2010s, it’s not absurd to unlock a new market by bringing in talent which appeals to younger demographics, who may otherwise not tune in to cable TV. Plenty of so-called ‘content creators’ even transition into more traditional forms of media. Dan Howell and Phil Lester, two of the UK’s first to turn YouTube into a steady career, were granted a show on Radio 1 in 2013 because of their internet success.
Those who suggest that YouTube is somehow not as valid as a form of celebrity than actors, musicians and broadcasters, often cite the accessibility as a core reason. Of course, anyone can just become, in the simplest sense, a YouTuber. Firstly, why is this a bad thing? In the UK, the white middle-class dominate the creative industries. An industry which widens access to creative careers is a welcome addition. Additionally, it is true that any random 8-year old can grab their parents phone and babble into it about Minecraft or Roblox, but these aren’t the people who are becoming famous. YouTube as a career is separate to it as a hobby. You may find the famous ones annoying, but so are half of the ‘regular’ celebrities on TV. Is that not part of the fun?
Perhaps the concept of a professional YouTuber or TikToker is inane. However, I’d argue that it’s no less inane than Tom Skinner dancing to ‘Bonkers’. At least George Clarke is a good dancer.
Aimee Goldblum
Feature image courtesy of appshunter.io on Unsplash. Image license found here. No changes were made to this image.
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