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Is there such a thing as an ordinary superstar?

By: Alison Gillmor

Posted: 05/2/2009 2:20 PM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

ACCORDING to Visible Measures, an independent American company that tracks Internet video consumption, Susan Boyle is one of the most famous people on the planet right now. Certainly she's the most famous average-looking 40-something woman.

One day overlooked and undervalued, the next day a superstar. Boyle's life has become an epic redemption drama, conveniently compressed into a seven-minute YouTube clip.

Viral video footage of Boyle singing I Dreamed a Dream

on Britain's Got Talent, along with her sultry take on Cry Me a River at a 1999 charity fundraiser, have garnered over 100 million hits (and counting). She's generating heavy traffic on Wikipedia, where the first Susan Boyle entry was posted within hours of her April 11 TV debut, and lots of buzz on social networking sites like Facebook.

Ashton Kutcher and Hugh Jackman have Twittered about her.

Boylemania involves a killer convergence of reality TV and new media, swept up into a hurricane of selfgenerating momentum. The more people see Boyle, the more people want to see her. In an increasingly atomized world, we crave communal experience and shared feeling.

In terms of getting Boyle and her big-voiced dream to an enormous global audience, the new media have done an unprecedented job. But these formats can only give their audience so much.

Boyle is a recession-era celebrity, battened down with loads of good old-fashioned substance. She's the anti-Paris Hilton. Forthright, cheerful and possessing a great set of pipes, Boyle is genuine. But the media machinery surrounding her? Not so much. There's something irresistible about the downright way Boyle walks on stage, faces the super-bitchy Simon Cowell, and then delivers an inspirational show tune with disarming directness and grace. People are responding to Boyle's realness. Paradoxically, that's the very quality threatened by the disingenuous scheming of reality TV.

Clearly, the producers of BGT are working the uglyduckling angle, editing Boyle's performance so we can watch the audience's callow sneering and eye-rolling disbelief give way, first to astonished applause and then to rapturous ovations.

Even as it wants to champion the genuine, reality TV can't help using a predictable, pre-packaged story arc. As Boyle's story spreads to the net, it's being further reduced into brief clips, quick visual images and 140-character messages. This system works well enough for Paris Hilton, who really exists only in cyberspace. But it's seems too limited for Boyle's unique and irrepressible outlines.

Sensing that audiences are suffering from glamour-fatigue, reality TV bills Boyle as reassuringly ordinary. But Boyle is now the most famous ordinary person in the world -- which is to say, she's not that ordinary anymore. The things we love about Boyle are those things most likely to be steamrolled by heavy pop-culture coverage.

Boyle's ubiquitous and instantaneous web presence demonstrates both the possibilities and the limitations of new media. That YouTube clip can go all over the world, but it's set up to tell one story: that Susan Boyle is a nobody who became a somebody. The real meaning of Boyle's life is that everybody is a somebody, even when they don't end up on YouTube.

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