The view from the moshpit and other fan tales

Julie Warmington says she’s always been a big music fan and avid gig goer and she’s got the ticket stubs, set lists, photographs and autographs to prove it.

Coinciding with New Zealand Music Month, this enterprising music fan has started the crowd sourced website, Fantale: Tales From the Front Row, for all music lovers to share their reviews, photos, videos and other souvenirs.

Originally, she had planned to create a timeline of her gig going history (“hundreds of gigs”) with her ticket stubs. She did some market research on what the average concert goer did with their show souvenirs – both digital and analogue – and arrived at the concept for Fantale.

Julie says the website – which is fully socially integrated where contributors can build up their profiles and follow and be followed – has only been live since April 25 but she’s been encouraged by the traffic, links and referrals that Fantale has been receiving.

It is the 1st of May so…happy NZ Music Month to y’all! what gigs you going to see this month? ow.ly/aB5uW

— Fantale (@fantalefm) April 30, 2012

“I even got a retweet from a Britpop star (James Walsh of Starsailor) which was unexpected and welcomed, but the most exciting thing was seeing the first user post a photo and review on the site,” she told SMNZ.

Fantale’s first listing was made on April 27 – a post by Loniusunknown of a Disasterradio/All Seeing Hands/Huf show in Palmerston North on April 21.

Julie says the reaction from musicians and the music industry has been really supportive. “I have been blown away by the feedback. Those people really count so I am pleased it has been well received.”

@fantalefm This is an absolutely wicked idea, I love you for doing this. I’m taking pics of all of our gigs to put up on here!

— twocartoons (@twocartoons) May 7, 2012

As far as Julie knows, there is no equivalent website in New Zealand for fans to share their reviews of live shows, as well as other concert ephemera. There are websites like Songkick that allow fans to add photos but it is not the main focus.

Fantale is also a natural extension of what Julie has been doing. She has worked with music companies and digital agencies in Britain, including four years as a marketing manager for MySpace. She currently works in Wellington as a digital producer.

The website is designed by Joanna Alpe at We Love Inc. “Not only was she the natural choice for me because she is enormously talented, but she totally got what I was trying to achieve.”

Julie’s next priority is to create a mobile app for Fantale because mobile technology means most fans are increasingly expecting to upload images or video directly from gigs. She promises a development in that regard and is currently looking for funding to make it happen.

Music lovers and artists now have a dedicated website for sharing their experiences of live music, long after the last beats have played. As New Zealand Music Month closes out for another year, it is hoped that one of the long term legacies from this year will be Fantale.

Also look for Fantale on Twitter and Facebook and send Julie your feedback on what you think of her website and how it works for you.

A surplus of fan fiction, cosplay, memes and other obsessions

Television in its current shape, like newspapers, is crumbling and it is the kids who are chipping away at it. It is as Clay Shirky predicted and the evidence can be found studying The Hunger Games, in the multitude of online forums, cosplay videos and images, parody videos, photo-shopped memes and web pages of user generated fan fiction.

Shirky’s big idea is that the Internet is a ubiquitous, participatory medium that is having an unprecedented impact on human society and behaviour. One of its side effects is to usher in the end of television as we have known it. Everyone over the age of 25 grew up watching television as the dominant entertainment and information medium. It was our default time suck of choice – or no choice because the Internet had yet to exist.

By contrast, the world depicted in The Hunger Games is one without an Internet and where information is controlled and flows from a central point. There’s one government television channel that everyone is compelled to watch. It could be a metaphor for our pre-Internet world where television was the king of media.

In the post war era, when people had more hours of leisure to burn, incredibly, we spent more and more of it watching television. We passively consumed televised broadcast content because it was entertainment, a surrogate friend, a way to feel connected to everyone else by being able to join the water cooler conversations at work and also because, as Shirky describes in his book Cognitive Surplus, the threshold for doing it was very low. It took no effort to turn on a television and collapse on a couch.

Apparently, Americans cumulatively watch up to 200 billion hours of television every year. But that’s changing. Those hours are increasingly going online. The shift wrought by the Internet, mobile communications and faster broadband speeds means that young people under 25 are not satisfied with passively consuming media. They expect to be active and contributory participants. They expect the immediacy and interactivity of the World Wide Web because that is what they’ve grown up with. This burgeoning participatory ethos is what Shirky calls the cognitive surplus – the hours spent tuning out have become about turning on.

“Several population studies – of high school students, broadband users, YouTube users – have noticed the change, and their basic observation is always the same; young populations with fast interactive media are shifting their behaviour away from media that presupposes pure consumption. Even when they watch video online, seemingly a pure analogue to TV, they have opportunities to comment on the material, to share it with their friends, to label, rate or rank it, and of course to discuss it with other viewers around the world.”

Shirky says the cumulative effect is revolutionary.

“The choices leading to reduced TV consumption are at once tiny and enormous. The tiny choices are individual; someone simply decides to spend the next hour talking to friends or playing a game or creating something instead of just watching. The enormous choices are collective ones, an accumulation of those tiny choices by the millions; the cumulative shift toward participation across a whole population enables the creation of a Wikipedia.”

Armed with the theory, I went looking for the cognitive surplus as it might apply to The Hunger Games. Others had observed that the all this extra brain cell activity not wasted on watching TV, had been disappearing into a morass of Angry Birds but we can guess that it flows on to what ever the next big Internet thing is. Right now, the next big thing to millions of kids is The Hunger Games. Warning: if you haven’t seen the film or read the book there are spoilers ahead.

Take for example, fan fiction, a sub culture where fans are so into a story, series or book, that they make up their own plots, subplots and parallel narratives. They fill in where they see gaps in the authorised narrative or characters. The Hunger Games fans who write fan fiction (called fanfic for short) are extremely dedicated and motivated. They have gone beyond consuming the books and the film and they’ve ‘occupied’ The Hunger Games world, bringing with them their own spin.

Many have run with the romantic intrigue between the main character Katniss Everdeen and the other two points of her love triangle – Peeta and Gale. They’ve been extrapolated by fans in love with the book but dissatisfied with its chasteness. Are you on Team Peeta or Team Gale for Katniss?

Foxface illustration by CarlyFriendsRock

Fans also love Katniss’ mysterious redheaded rival, Foxface. She’s even become the focal point of a fascinating controversy. Did Foxface commit suicide by deliberately eating nightlock berries or was her death accidental? This is hotly debated online by fans who feel passionate one way or the other. As much as I like the idea that Foxface decided to subvert the game, I am on the side of the ‘accidentalists’.

Check out also the Hunger Games wiki where fans write and edit a definitive resource on the books (and the film) according to the principles of Wikipedia.

There are also cosplay videos and images of fans dressing and acting out their favourite character roles. These kids script, video, edit and publish their own tributes to the books. The results are not always pretty but it’s kind of touching that fans do this out of love for the story.

Some recreate scenes from the book. And others make parodies, like this one of The Hipster Games. Some get the braids, bows, arrows and a flinty stare.

Needless to say, there are also photoshopped memes!

This explosion of fan love creativity is what the cognitive surplus looks like. There was a debate about race because some fans were outraged two of the game candidates, Thresh and Rue, are played by black actors in the film. The racist fans were quickly shot down – one, for making it an issue of having black actors and two, for their poor reading comprehension. The book clearly says:

“And most hauntingly, a twelve year old girl from District 11. She has dark brown skin and eyes, but other than that, she’s very like Prim in size and demeanour.”

Someone appalled at the racism displayed towards the idea of having black characters started a Tumblr that aggregated the racist tweets and reactions to them. It became a rallying point for the anti-racist backlash.

Just saw "To Kill a Mockingbird"; since when is Tom Robinson black?!" - if Tumblr had existed in 1962. #HungerGames #RueWasAlwaysBlackGuys

—
Alice Moran (@Alice_Moran) March 27, 2012

@HG_Tweets In all these people's defense, it's easy to miss things when reading through 2 small holes in a white sheet.

—
  (@disgussions) March 28, 2012

Truth be told, I felt like objecting a little because the two Asian kids didn’t get much screen time. One dies in a highlights reel of an earlier games and the other kid doesn’t even get going, just one of those immediately slaughtered at the Cornucopia. But hey, at least Asians got represented, even if they were arrow and spear fodder.

I am just scratching the surplus here. This obsessive mania over The Hunger Games may seem frivolous and trivial but to me, it represents something much bigger – a rowdy, clamouring, gorgeous din of voices, all busy creating, sharing, debating, trolling and celebrating with a zeal that goes with being a true fan. That noise you hear is the sound of an accumulation of surplus creativity finding its outlet on the World Wide Web. That has got to be more interesting than watching people watch television.

What’s your cognitive surplus doing?

Catching The Hunger Games virus

Put the success of The Hunger Games down to the girl with the bow and arrows. She is the heartbeat of the 26 million copy selling trilogy of books by Suzanne Collins that has also been adapted into a Hollywood juggernaut.

The film roared into the cinemas in its first weekend. It made $NZ260 million in cinemas around the world. In North America, the film had the most successful first weekend for a non-sequel film and had the third biggest opening weekend of all time (surpassed only by Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and The Dark Knight).

The Hunger Games has also become the most successful film at midnight screenings, the opening day trend that is becoming so important to defining an event film. It too kicked off in New Zealand with midnight screenings, making $NZ1.6 million in its first weekend. Bridget Jones captured the ‘red eye’ scene in this Auckland Now post.

Meanwhile, the deafening buzz on social media has been building for months. The film’s launch has been underpinned by a well executed social media campaign on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Tumblr. You can read more about it here, here and here.

If there was ever any doubt, we now know The Hunger Games is going to break all kinds of box office records in the months ahead. If you must single out any one individual, blame Katniss Everdeen. She is a 16 year old girl with way fewer First World problems than your average American teenager, yet she has become a cultural touchstone for millions of young adults. Her predicament is an elemental one – how to stay alive in a lethal environment where the only choices are to die or kill other children as unlucky as yourself.

We pick up her story just before she volunteers in place of her younger sister Prim to join the ritual killing fields. It is the first demonstration of her circles of responsibility – to her sister, to her family, to her community and to her district. Lastly, she accepts the biggest burden of all – an obligation to all the districts enslaved by a totalitarian regime that rules this future dystopia from its morally bankrupt capital, Panem.

The name Panem even comes from the Latin phrase for bread and circuses – Panem et Circensus. It is a hat tip to when emperors used these two levers to massage public sentiment. The Hunger Games are an echo from a time when gladiators died while entertaining crowds at the Coliseum and across the Roman Empire.

The grimmer tragedy of these games is that it is children who are selected at random to kill or be killed. Think of a kind of lethal Big Brother where bitchiness and nastiness are emphasised with spears, knives and arrows, and where the backstabbing is not metaphorical.

The whole time, the gory spectacle – the slaughtering and teen angst – is televised live. The show is an unholy intermingling of entertainment and power politics. It is how the rulers of Panem say to the people that they have exclusive power over the life and death of their subjects.

By chapter two, our investment in Katniss is complete. We realise, like her, that her only way home is over the bodies of the other kids. We see her guided by her moral compass as she negotiates a way through the killing ground with skill, heart and intelligence. We applaud her choices and agonise over her dilemmas. Her angst makes her an emotional lightning rod for the story’s target audience. She is acutely conscious of the contradictions of her humanitarianism and the violence she has to inflict in the context of the system’s cruelty and ritualised barbarism.

When Katniss forms an alliance with Rue, the youngest participant, she learns that her new friend likes music more than anything else in the world.

“Music?” I say. In our world, I rank music somewhere between hair ribbons and rainbows in terms of usefulness. At least a rainbow gives you a tip about the weather.

There’s also this episode which could be interpreted as humour of the blackest kind.

There was a guy like that a few years ago from District 6 called Titus. He went completely savage and the Gamemakers had to have him stunned with electric guns to collect the bodies of the players he’d killed before he ate them. There are no rules in the arena, but cannibalism doesn’t play well with the Capitol audience, so they tried to head it off. There was some speculation that the avalanche that finally took Titus out was specifically engineered to ensure the victor was not a lunatic.

The three fingered salute that’s being adopted by The Hunger Games’ most passionate fans has become another signature of the book and film, in the same way the Vulcan live long and prosper sign was embraced by Trekkies everywhere.

Then something unexpected happens. At least, I don’t expect it because I don’t think of District 12 as a place that cares about me. But a shift has occurred since I stepped up to take Prim’s place, and now it seems I have become someone precious. At first one, then another, then almost every member of the crowd touches the three middle fingers of their left hand to their lips and holds it out to me. It is an old and rarely used gesture of our district, occasionally seen at funerals. It means thanks, it means admiration, it means good-bye to someone you love.

When her success becomes a threat to Panem, she makes an implacable enemy. She has become the activist/dissident who strikes fear into all police states. Author Suzanne Collins says the inspiration for The Hunger Games came from switching channels between Survivor and the war in Iraq. But one could imagine the inspiration also being the regime in North Korea where people live in constant threat of famine, of Syria where agents of government torture and kill children with impunity, and China, Bahrain, Iran and others where human rights activists are routinely harassed and imprisoned.

The real conflict at the core of The Hunger Games is not the games themselves, but the struggle to bring down a system and to free a people from a ruthless dictatorial government. Katniss literally becomes the game changer and, I am guessing, the spark that ignites a revolution.

It’s a raging, bone shattering narrative, a squeaky bottom read, an extraordinary heroine and a monster at the box office. Collins herself worked on the screenplay with the filmmakers. Jennifer Lawrence is an excellent casting choice for Katniss. She plays haunted and hunted so exquisitely, just as she did in Winter’s Bone. The rest of the young cast – as well as veterans like Donald Sutherland and Woody Harrelson – serve up post apocalypse survivor chic eye candy for the PG13 audience.

It’s a case of so far, so good. The Hunger Games hits the bull’s eye on the first shot and there’s much more to come. But don’t wait for the movie sequels. Read the books – especially the brilliant first one. It’s titled The Hunger Games and it is how the world came to know Katniss Everdeen.

Bring on the Stop Kony memes!

The Stop Kony campaign has disturbed me and maybe not in the way that you might expect. Judging from the reaction to it on social media, it depresses me that so many Internet users seem naïve to the fact there are wars, conflicts, despotism and that – shock, horror! – many of the victims are children.

I also despair at how a very successful, clever and manipulative marketing campaign by the charity responsible for it has been able to focus so much global attention on one man and one conflict against a backdrop of so many other conflicts, theatres of violence and other global issues that are equally, if not more, deserving of our awareness and attention.

Without wanting to minimise or dismiss the suffering of Joseph Kony’s victims, the Internet campaign has created a whole new level of global attention about one fugitive warlord on the strength of one emotive and factually slippery video documentary by the US-based charity Invisible Children.

Invisible Children has hit the sweet spot of the Internet age – the easy and spontaneous spreading of compelling content and the Internet public’s desire to feel connected and to contribute. But the impulse to help can have unintended consequences. History is littered with well-intentioned interventions that end up causing more harm than good. It would be intellectually lazy and foolish to become an adherent for a cause without looking closely at the credentials of any campaign and people behind it – particularly when it is making a case for military intervention.

My other big problem with the Stop Kony campaign is that it is almost too successful. The marketing collateral is too slick, too convenient and too packaged. There is also something unnerving about the cult-like online outpourings of new believers that have embraced the mission to bring Joseph Kony to justice when days ago they would have struggled to find Uganda on a map.

Helping communities that are subject to violence, protecting the natural environment and other big humanitarian or ecological themes should not be subjected to becoming the latest issue du jour. Instead they require steady and long term commitment to effect real meaningful change. One of the dangers of the Internet is that it is also home to a lot of well-meaning but impressionable people who need to beware of small groups with agendas, especially as they become increasingly sophisticated in setting trends.

I have always been a believer that the most interesting phenomena on the Internet are the ones that emerge in the grass roots and surprise us all when they go viral. But the Stop Kony campaign is simply too calculated for that. The narrow agenda of one charity just does not constitute a grass roots groundswell. It feels more like manipulation.

Stop Kony is also disconcertingly precedent setting. Well, that may not be strictly true. Naming and shaming is nothing new. In China, the phrase ‘human flesh search engine’ is used for crowdsourcing netizens to out the identities of individuals who have committed some egregious deed. Stop Kony’s precedence setting is in the way it has gathered an online baying mob calling screaming for intervention and justice in a matter of days. If only the Justice League of America existed in the real world and the territorial sovereignty of countries could be conveniently overlooked.

Can we now look to Internet campaigns that make unlikely stars out of Bosco ‘the Terminator’ Ntaganda, formerly of the Rwandan Patriotic Army who, like Kony, is also at large and accused of war crimes and enlisting children into his army? Or Ahmad Mohammed Harun, Sudan’s Minister of State for Humanitarian Affairs, who is wanted for war crimes in Darfur? What about Ali Mohammad Ali Abd Al Rahman, the alleged leader of Sudan’s Janjaweed militia that committed untold atrocities also in Darfur, and others?

As a corollary to this thought, the example of Charlie Wilson who persuaded US Congress in the 1980s to arm the mujahedeen in Afghanistan against the Soviets is also pertinent. By so doing, the United States ended up arming their current enemies the Taliban.

The good news is that in almost the blink of an eye, the Kony memes have begun. The counter culture has arrived. People have begun questioning, criticising and mocking the Stop Kony campaign. The Internet is again demonstrating that it is an anarchic organism that resists crass oversimplification and domination by a faddish agenda that is sweeping through its body politic.

Whether the campaign is honest or not, the crossfire between the Kony Kool Aid drinkers and the sceptics is a brilliant sign that the democracy of the Internet is alive and kicking. I know where my allegiance lies. Go you good thing.

Megaupload’s Kim Dotcom gives PR master class

Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom has given his side of the story on TV3′s Campbell Live programme in New Zealand and it is proving to be a master class in public relations. The man accused of being a piracy king made some excellent points during the interview last night. He denies being a flight risk because he says everything he owns has been seized by the authorities and he wants to fight the charges.

As Dotcom pointed out, there are hundreds of other file sharing websites that do what Megaupload did. They include Mediafire, Filesurf, Rapidshare and others. “We are not responsible for the problem. Where does piracy come from? Piracy comes from people – let’s say in Europe – who do not have access to movies at the same time as they are released in the US. This has been born within the licensing model and the old business model that Hollywood has where they release something in one country but they release trailers around the world pitching that new movie …. If the business model is one where everybody has access at the same time, you wouldn’t have a piracy problem. It really is the Government of the United States protecting an outdated business model that doesn’t work anymore in the age of the Internet.”

He claims that content owners had ways of removing links to any content that they said was infringing copyright. Megaupload enabled them to have “direct delete access” to all its servers and they could remove links to content that infringed their copyright. “So they could access our system and remove any link that they could find on the Internet without us being involved – and we are talking about 180 partners including every major movie studio, including Microsoft and all big content producers – and they have used that system heavily… They had full access.”

One of the biggest contributors of evidence against Megaupload, the Motion Picture Association of America, had never taken legal action against Megaupload during its seven year existence. “If you are a company that is hurt so much by what we are doing – billions of dollars of damage – you don’t wait and sit and do nothing. You call your lawyers and you try and sue us and try to stop us from what we are doing.”

Dotcom says it is because Megaupload was not responsible for the actions of its users. The same United States law that came to YouTube’s defence in a law suit taken by Viacom, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, shields online service providers from the actions of their users. “We are a lamb compared to what was going on at YouTube at the time.”

He says the amount of traffic going through Megaupload made it impossible to police for copyright infringement. He cited the figure of 800 file transfers every second.

You can watch the John Campbell interview here (nearly half a million views in less than 24 hours!).

Whether Kim Dotcom is guilty or innocent remains to be seen but his performance was a masterful exercise in public relations. The instant reaction on Twitter and Facebook showed how effectively he has turned some public opinion his way.

Hayden Raw of The Common Room posted this comparison taken from Campbell Live’s Facebook page.

My, how the media has influence. #kimdotcom twitpic.com/8qino3

—
Hayden Raw (@haydenraw) March 01, 2012

Here are some Twitter reactions – both for and against Dotcom. There is also praise for Campbell Live for attempting to balance excitable and one-sided news coverage of an issue that has become emblematic of the Internet era and the current war between the legacy content providers and the digital insurgency.

Hurrah @JohnJCampbell you are magnificent! Such a compelling & insightful interview #KimDotCom

—
Ash Tulloch (@Ash_Tulloch) March 01, 2012

I can't imagine people were using Megaupload for legit file sharing. @JohnJCampbell #kimdotcom interview.

—
Niemand (@zv470) March 01, 2012

#KimDotcom looks like he ate a zeppelin & sounds like Col Klink, but his story is FAR more believable than the FBI's 3news.co.nz/Kim-Dotcoms-fi…

—
HogsAteMySister (@hogsatemysister) March 01, 2012

Why do these Internet villains always to look so creepy? bit.ly/yYahm9 #KimDotcom #Julian Assange

—
Louise Armstrong (@TorontoLouise) March 01, 2012

Watching the Dotcom interview on 3. Fascinating guy. Can't believe NZ is buying into the USA's case when it's clearly bollocks #KimDotcom

—
Lawrence (@suburban_ennui) March 01, 2012

@minecrafted_ totally agree, they just singled out megaupload, they shouldn't punish hosts for their users breaking the rules.

—
Trey (@TreyDeLonais) March 01, 2012

What strikes me as interesting is his self awareness - seems to know who he is and what he represents. #KimDotCom Smart guy at face value.

—
sjw (@stevenjwoodman) March 01, 2012

If you took the search function away from Megaupload you'd have Dropbox.

—
seth simonds (@sethsimonds) March 01, 2012

Jeremy Lin is the new face of Asian overachievement

Harvard economics graduate and basketball star, Jeremy Lin is blazing a new chapter in Asian American achievement. While we in New Zealand are still waiting for the first Asian All Black, Lin has become an almost overnight sensation in the NBA for his electrifying performances for the New York Knicks over the past few weeks.

This Taiwanese Chinese American (Taiwanese because his parents came from Taiwan, Chinese because of his ethnicity and American because the United States is his birthplace) story is one of those against the odds stories that become part of the folklore of any sport. But for millions of Asian Americans, he has even greater value for being, like them, of an ethnic background that breaks the usual tropes of what it takes to be a successful NBA player.

Until Lin appeared to burst on the NBA stage this month, there were no Asian American professionals in the top rank of US professional basketball. Many of us know Yao Ming (now retired) but he was a Chinese national and had the massive advantage of being two metres 29 centimetres tall. That’s seven feet six inches in old money.

Jeremy Lin is a less statuesque one metre 92 centimetres or six foot three inches. To put his recent exploits in perspective, Lin had only played 55 minutes in total for his New York Knicks team’s first 23 games of the current season. He was a virtually forgotten man on the bench until he got his first start. He was even on loan to another team in a lower league when he was recalled by Knicks coach Mike D’Antoni who candidly admitted Lin “got lucky because we were playing so bad”.

But he seized his chance like a glutton at a banquet. Against the Jersey Nets on February 4, Lin scored 25 points, helping his team to 99-92 win. He scored an astonishing 38 points against the Los Angeles Lakers and he made this astonishing play against the Toronto Raptors with seconds on the clock and the scores tied.

It’s been ‘Linsanity’ ever since. After he began starting for the Knicks, Lin led the previously struggling team on a seven match winning streak. He has been unstoppable, scoring freely and been integral to bringing winning NBA excitement to the Knicks home games at Madison Square Garden.

The trick about Jeremy Lin’s stratospheric rise in basketball folklore is very much about how he is absolutely dominating games and has become the team leader. He plays with no fear (something he attributes to his faith as a Christian) and shows incredible composure for a young player who has only just made it onto the NBA stage and is now playing among the NBA elite.

That is not to say he is without a weakness. He can turn the ball over to the opposition too often as he did against the Hornets, a defeat that brought the flying Knicks back down to earth and reminded everyone that Lin is human after all.

9 TOs wont get it done...gotta learn from my mistakes and move on to the next one. See you guys sunday!

—
Jeremy Lin (@JLin7) February 18, 2012

An undeniable factor in the appeal of Lin’s story has been his ethnicity as a Chinese American. He has become an iconic figure to the huge East Asian diaspora communities in the United States and Canada and he has also come to ‘represent’ Chinese in Taiwan and in the People’s Republic.

This excellent USA Today article explores the flukey quality of Lin’s emergence in a sport dominated by African Americans and what it means to local Chinese.

“We’re here for Jeremy Lin,” said Samuel Li, 21, a Chinese Canadian from Markham, Ontario, who attended the (Raptors) game. “He is the first of his kind. We’re Yao Ming fans, but he’s seven feet and from China. Jeremy is my size and from America. We can identify with him.”

The excitement translating into Lin’s growing popularity is naturally captured on social media. He has amassed almost 450,000 Twitter followers (he is @JLin7) and on China’s Sina weibo, he has nearly 900,000 followers. Lin was also reportedly the most common searched item on the Baidu search engine in China between February 2 and February 14 and he has become a feature in the Chinese language mainstream media. His number 17 jersey is the top selling shirt at NBAstore.com with Hong Kong and Taiwan being the third and fourth destinations behind the US and Canada.

There’s also been a lot of unintended comedy around the Lin story. ESPN had to apologise for its ‘Chink in the armour’ headline while Fox Sports columnist Jason Whitlock had to say sorry for his ‘two inches of pain’ tweet – a reference to the smaller than average penis size stereotype of Asian men!

Chinese netizens also ridiculed a Xinhua news agency article that explored the possibility of Lin, who is known by his Chinese name Lin Shuhao (林書豪), giving up his US citizenship so he could play for China at the upcoming Olympics.

This video of Lin’s heavily American accented and fairly elementary level Mandarin has been garnering views on YouTube.

Here’s another clip from the same interview, which won him plenty more admirers in China because he said he was Chinese. It’s a sensitive issue for many mainland Chinese because they resent the way people from Taiwan differentiate themselves by saying they are Taiwanese.

Meanwhile, the Jeremy Lin bandwagon rolls on. The Knicks won again after their loss to the Hornets and Lin was again instrumental.

There are so many arresting elements to this unfolding story.  Lin gets his chance and grabs it. He beats the odds and becomes a winner and a star. He triumphs over racial discrimination and ethnic profiling. He is a role model for Christian fans because he plays for his faith. He embodies the hopes and pride of millions of Asian North Americans. He makes millions more fans in China and Taiwan and inadvertently gets caught up in cross strait rivalry between the two. He becomes a household name to all Americans. Finally, he leads the Knicks to the NBA championship. Well, that bit is yet to come but what an exclamation mark that would be.

It could be a Hollywood movie, except if Hollywood had made it, the leading man would not have been Asian. That’s what, in the case of Jeremy Lin, makes real life better than fiction.

Turning Lana Del Rey into flesh and blood

Loving Lana Del Rey comes with baggage. When the Internet celebrity (real name Lizzie Grant) leapt off YouTube and MP3 downloads and into the brick and mortar venues of show business, her meteoric rise was scorned across the Internet. Her wobbly televised performance on Saturday Night Live, the bee stung collagen lips, her persona as an embodiment of doomed romance and an album that has underwhelmed many critics had many people shouting fraud and hype.

Grant, the daughter of a millionaire father, has been catapulted into the radiance of being a global mega star on the basis of the thinnest of CVs with her reinvention as a siren of doomed love and misspent youth. Her ‘gangsta Nancy Sinatra’ creation, Lana Del Rey, arrived shimmering like a digital mirage on the strength of three songs and three corresponding YouTube videos – Video Games, Blue Jeans and Born to Die.

So what’s a girl to do when the transition from Internet debutante to physical world star hits a rocky patch?

One answer is to hold the course and trust in the adage that all publicity is good publicity. The blowback from critical music fans and former fans has been directly proportional to the Internet multiplier effect that has introduced her to millions more new admirers and haters. As a corollary of that, the soaring expectations of an exponentially growing network of fans can easily outpace any artist’s ability to meet those expectations – especially if many of those fans claim a sense of ownership from having discovered the foundling star before her status went super nova.

The road to fame and reputation in show business has many casualties. It is when careful industry-crafted illusions get smashed to smithereens by the obvious intrusion of the kinds of visible levers and pulleys that go on backstage to project the polished image. Milli Vanilli, after winning Best New Artist Grammy in 1990, was ruined by a lip-synching debacle while performing and the English pop star Betty Boo’s early career in the 1990s similarly ran aground while Britney Spears has also endured slings and arrows for not being able to hold a tune in a live show.

This was the precipice that Lana Del Rey flirted with when she was introduced to millions of Saturday Night Live viewers, many seeing her perform for the first time. At least we know she wasn’t lip synching because she sang flat in a few places and generally looked awkward in the limelight of one of America’s biggest talent showcases.

It is a small wonder that the polarised ripples of American social media chatter stemming from that off key but strangely compelling performance has perversely served to help slingshot the name of Lana Del Rey into near Earth orbit. To quote Lady Gaga, meet the fame monster.

What is really interesting about Lana Del Rey is that she is a fiction and YouTube is her birthplace. It is all very redolent of a future for popular culture as portrayed by the Canadian science fiction writer, William Gibson. In his novel Idoru, he introduces a character, Rei Toei, which is a cyberspace dwelling artificial intelligence that embodies itself as a popular female singer who learns to interact and engage with her human fans. She is essentially a cypher or a digital projection of her fans’ desires and imagination.

While there’s no disputing that Lizzie Grant, the woman behind Lana Del Rey is flesh and blood, what is so intriguing is the idea that her star creation and alter ego really began life as a handful of videos on the Internet and then went through a shaky metamorphosis into real world celebrity, one that goes on concert tours and meets fans in person.

The emergent Lana Del Rey fascinates beyond the fact that her album Born to Die has defied the critics and become a hit download in 14 countries. She fascinates not just because there is evident talent behind the hype. She fascinates not just because Video Games is an extraordinary song that lingers long after its final notes fade. Lana Del Rey fascinates because she could well be America’s first popular music celebrity born of YouTube who has translated Internet fame into flesh and blood analogue world success, despite being since abandoned by many of those who made her an Internet star in the first place.