Plugged In
(from: Us Magazine, June 1997 issue)
written by: Al Weisel
[Skip to the part about Rachel]
DO A WEB SEARCH FOR JUST ABOUT ANY POPULAR
actor, actress or musician (and even some not-so-popular ones) and you're bound to
find that some dedicated fan somewhere has put up a site in honor of his or her hero. Type
in "Smashing Pumpkins" and you might discover Chris Carman and Shyla Gorman's
Web page (http://www.muohio.edu/~carmance/sp), where you can view a short movie of
the band's Conan O'Brien appearance. If by some chance you're wondering about the
numerological implications of Keanu Reeves' name when it's translated into
Scrabble squares, then the place to visit is the way-excellent Society for Keanu Consciousness
(http://www.empirenet.com/~rdaeley/skc/index.html).
The Web has become the world's biggest fan club
Most sites, however, favor straightforward worship, like Ben Hendricks' Lovely
Gwyneth Paltrow page (http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~bh/gp/), which obsessively compiles
almost everything ever written about the Emma star. Her fiance, meanwhile, is the
subject of a more stripped-down site (http://pages.nyu.edu/~nqr1042/bp.html)
put together by a New York University student. It contains
nothing but pictures of Brad Pitt, which is all that many fans are looking for
anyway.
The Internet has grown astronomically in the past few years, and
suddenly 15 megabytes of fame are within the grasp of anyone with a computer. And
just about every celebrity home page has links to other pages with almost anything
you could possibly want to know about a given star.
"My friends think it's embarrassing for a 35-year-old to have a fan site," says Szczerbinski, who runs
a Suzanne Vega Web site (http://www.vega.net). "My girlfriend uses word Webmaster as a derogatory term."
Szczerbinski, an investor from Lauderhill, Fla., had no idea he
would end up as a Webmaster when he first ventured into cyberspace. But
by last September, Vega's record label, A&M, caught on to the site's potential as a
promotional gold mine and designated it the "official" Suzanne Vega Web site. For Szczerbinski,
this has been a very mixed blessing.
He has realized many fans' ulimate dream - he met the star. ("It wasn't gushy," he says.
"It was very businesslike. She took notes.") Now, however, Vega's record label exercises
some control over the site. "When they send stuff, I have to sign long legal documents,"
Szczerbinski says. "It takes the fun out of it."
In the anarchic world of the Internet, however, most sites are not official. The Internet is
an electronic Wild West where anyone has the freedom to post almost anything. This
practice does not sit well with jittery entertainment conglomerates. Last December,
while Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the starship Enterprise was in theaters battling the Borg,
a 48-year-old Trekkie who runs of the numerous Star Trek Web sites (http://www.cdsnet.net/vidiot/), received a registered letter that was chilling. The letter, to at least 10 other sites and signed a lawyer for Viacom, owner of the Star Trek copyright,
ordered Brown to
remove all pictures, videos and audio files from his Web site.
Faced with having his site shut down by his Internet service prorider, which
received a copy of the letter, complied. "Viacom is eating the hand that feeds it," he says. "Why
not work with us instead of coming on like a big-brother badass company?"
Many other Trekkies protested Viacom's letter as well, presenting a powerful example
of one of the Internet's special qualities: It spawns communities. While
many fan sites begin as altars to the cult of celebrity, they often end up as something
more: a group of people that straddles geo graphical and sociological barriers.
The David Duchovny Estrogen Brigade (http://www.crl.com/~miri/index.html) began as a
group of women collectively swooning over the X-Files star, but for Beth Wilson, who
operates one of the group's Web pages, it became something else entirely. "I'm a very
shy person. Doing this Web site helped me come out of my shell," says the 33-year-old
Austin, Texas, resident with a "boring government job." Wilson even traveled to Seattle to meet other
members of the group at an X-Files convention.
Unfortunately, one of her new friends subsequently died of cancer. "She had throat cancer, and she wasn't able to speak toward the end," Wilson says. "But she would write e-mail messages to people in the group, and she said it was very helpful to
have people about how she was feeling."
While the Web is no longer solely the domain of academics and computer geeks,
it's not nearly as diverse as the real world.
Internet surfers, like the beach variety, are still largely male and white. Rachel Décoste,
a black 20-year-old computer-engineering major at the University of Guelph, in Canada,
who runs the Whitney Houston Worship Webpage (http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rdecoste/),
is something of a pioneer. Decoste is a self-professed Houston fanatic who
even sports a "Whitney Houston Forever" tattoo on her ankle. The popularity of Décoste's site has become daunting.
Décoste gets so much e-mail that she can barely keep up. And
except for the hate mail from an Alanis
Morissette fan who told her to "get a life," it has all been positive.
Décoste, however, is still waiting in vain for one person to
contact her: "My mom says, 'If your page is so big, how come you haven't
met Whitney?' I'm still waiting. If I got
e-mail from her,
probably cry."
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