Every year – as part of the newspaper comment-page industrial complex that churns out summer columns on “beach bodies” and festive complaints about not being allowed to say “Merry Christmas” anymore – the arrival of yet another series of I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! prompts hack writers to cry, “Celebrity?! I’ve never heard of them.” While a disconnection from popular culture is nothing new in the British media – Paul Johnson, who died recently, infamously decried “The Menace of Beatlism” for The New Statesman in 1964, aged just 36 – the nature of celebrity has changed and fractured as the internet age has progressed.
Many online celebrities with big audiences will never appear in a national newspaper
While Andrew Tate, the recently-arrested former kickboxer, first touched fame with a brief appearance on Big Brother in 2016 (he was removed from the show after a video of him striking a woman with a belt became public), it was through his misogynistic proclamations on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and most notably TikTok that he became famous to millions of young people, especially young men.
Those ’60s avatars of “toxic masculinity”, the Krays, went from infamous in London to famous internationally because David Bailey took their photos and included them in his Box of Pin-Ups (1964). By contrast, the traditional media had to chase after Tate, writing profiles and features after he’d already gained notoriety and millions of views. When he was arrested in Romania on organised crime, human trafficking and rape charges, many columnists admitted they’d never heard of him before. His fame was significant but contained.
It is not just the out-and-out monsters of social media who can make names for themselves without the imprimatur of newspapers and broadcasters. If you know a teenage girl who’s active on TikTok, it’s likely she’ll know the name Alix Earle. The 22-year-old University of Miami student has more than five million followers on TikTok and Instagram – a number that’s growing rapidly – mostly down to her “get ready with me” videos which… well, it’s self-explanatory. While the press in the US is already writing about her a lot, the UK papers have yet to mention her beyond a search engine traffic-chasing piece by The Sun (“Who is Alix Earle?”)
The point here is not that you should have heard of Earle. If her videos were food they would be a nutrition-free cloud of sugary candy floss. It’s also not new for fame to be limited to a single generation, with anyone even five years older none the wiser; the urban legend about a high court judge being told The Beatles were “a popular beat combo” comes to mind. But the difference here is that modern fame is so fragmented and freed from the need to pass through shared cultural checkpoints.
The period when musicians needed the NME and Top of the Pops to signify they had made it is long over – the BBC declined to even produce a Christmas TOTP in 2022 – and weekend newspaper supplements no longer tend to elevate comedians, authors, actors or “cultural figures” to fame. Instead, they run to catch up with online buzz. In fact, for younger generations, the stamp of approval from traditional media can be an indication that an artist is “an industry plant” – made to appear authentic while being nothing of the sort.
In 2021, The Tramp Stamps, an all-female rock band who said their origin story was “3 girls got drunk at a bar and wrote a song,” were swiftly filleted by TikTok users. They found that the lead singer had previously been a solo artist playing pop songs and the drummer had been producing commercial music for years; both women had publishing deals. The group began to get mainstream coverage but only because of the social media drama; the negative fame from TikTok was the only thing that made them interesting. As of January 2023, the band has scrubbed its TikTok account of videos; its last single release was in October 2021.
Sam Ryder’s trajectory from TikTok to “mainstream” fame is the polar opposite of the Tramp Stamps’ quick ascent to mid-air explosion. When it was announced in March 2022 that he would be representing the UK at the Eurovision Song Contest, the general tone of the press coverage was “who?”. While Ryder had 12 million TikTok followers at the time – it’s now risen to 14.2 million – and had signed a record deal with Warner Music in 2021, newspapers and broadcasters still treated him as a bit of an oddity. By the end of the year, Ryder had come second in Eurovision – beaten only by Ukraine – and headlined BBC One’s New Year’s Eve broadcast, performing Queen and Taylor Swift medleys alongside his own songs, and bringing up Mel C, Sigrid and Justin Hawkins from The Darkness for duets.
Don’t mistake Ryder’s 2022 for the pattern that modern fame has to follow, though. There are many online celebrities with big audiences and incomes to match that will never appear on TV or in the pages of a national newspaper. Scrolling through my TikTok “For You Page” – the algorithmically-generated stream of clips the social network serves you – I encountered a curry house reviewer (59,000 followers), a lesbian lumberjack with mighty arms who chops wood (507,000 followers), and a guy who explains songs (4.4 million followers).
Across the internet, there are people who have become internationally famous without ever appearing in traditional media, as well as many more who are medium- or even micro-famous but still well-known enough to make a living from a truly committed audience. Next time you read a columnist howling that they have “never heard of” someone, consider that the readership of that newspaper could be many times smaller than the audience that unheralded celebrity has been quietly building.
In the early days of online culture, a common line was “on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”; now it’s “on the internet, not everybody knows you’re a star.”
Mic Wright is a journalist based in London. He writes about technology, culture and politics
