Still a fascinating topic, and you have much to add to it with your own experience in reality TV and your new connection to Norman Korpi. You’ve also done some great research on SL musicians, gathered interesting testimony, and focused our attention on the simultaneously limiting and liberating qualities of SL for celebrities – that many feel they can concern themselves less with appearance and focus more on their art, while at the same time, the SL public still has specific demands on celebrity appearance.
My main suggestion regards organization/focus. You touch upon many topics, but do not make any single topic clearly dominant. Included are: 1) race/sexuality (as both ‘identities’ and ‘appearances’) and access to celebrity status, 2) appearance in general (including body type) and SL celebrity, 3) Norm and Pedro of the Real World and their experiences and your personal identification with them, 4) musicians on SL and their new freedoms and recurrent limitations. The most intriguing 2 possibilities I find are:
a)focus on reality tv and sl celebrity statuses using your own and Norm’s experiences, with some reference to other celebrities in SL. You could include in your study both of your attempts to become SL celebrities – what you need to do, what fails, how it differs from RL, etc. It would seem logical to also search for individuals who are celebrities only, or at least first became celebrities, in SL. This would make the comparison to reality TV more coherent. Reality TV celebrity status is like a second- or third-tier status, distinct from Hollywood royalty and, as Norm could tell you better than I, distinct from other institutionalized mass-mediated forms of celebrity. Maybe the same thing is occurring in SL – that some ‘other’ category of celebrity status is produced in this environment.
b)Focus on SL musicians and their discussions of their newfound freedom to focus on their art – because appearance is ‘programmed’ and does not require ‘maintenance’ (recurrent cosmetic surgery, going to gym, facials, etc), yet does require money to buy appropriately stylish skins, clothing, accessories, gestures, etc. You could make brief references to your own and Norm’s experiences, but you would have to place them carefully, as you would be opening up an entirely new subject/medium – reality TV.
I think race and sexuality may more clearly become ‘appearance’ issues, in addition to ‘identity’ issues, when we talk about avatars and SL. However, opening the question of race and sexuality would require, it seems, talking about that massive issue of identity, which you omitted. Bringing it back in to the research would make for an interesting third possible project: for example, how the relationship between appearance/identity and celebrity status change in SL versus RL.
December 19, 2007 at 5:33 am
Will,
I agree with Jason in that you chose a topic with a lot of potential: celebrity status can be as fascinating in Second Life as it seems to be in Real Life.
I think though that you tried to integrate too many topics and that that unavoidably distorted your original idea. I would have liked to see more images as well, maybe to compare and contrast better?
Either way congratulations as you gave a great presentation and are clearly getting over the “shyness”…
T
December 19, 2007 at 9:22 pm
I suspected that the presentation would be more focused if I would leave off the whole reality TV thing, concentrating only on Second Life, but I still included it because of the discussions we had about it.
In hindsight, I wish I would have just concentrated on physical avatar appearance in the virtual world without trying to draw connections to reality TV.
So, I would still like to focus on the similarities/differences between celebrity physical image in the real world and in SL, but without the confusion of references to myself or Norman Korpi. It will be more interesting and focused if I just concern myself with virtual world celebrities, more specifically musicians, as you detail in suggestion B.
December 21, 2007 at 5:52 pm
I really enjoyed this presentation. The idea of SL as a global open-mic really piqued my interests. I think that you should focus on this, or certainly explore it further. SL as a stepping stone to RL celebrity, or wilder yet, as a substitute for it. I think you could, and sort of did, build a story about how SL elimnates many of the problems of being a celebrity and gives fame a whole new digital face.