elmification nation

it's been a while since my last post and a lot has happened. the most important events revolve around a vlogger whose username is elmify.

i discovered this young woman through twitter as hank and john green and meekakitty were all raving about her. i ended up watching all 28 (at that time) of her videos and quite frankly, i was smitten. a song was written. so here's a new part of the question- this song was legitimately written because i was very touched by elmify's vlogs. her ability to make us examine our own psyches while making us laugh is pure genius. the song literally just flowed out as if i were the vessel. that makes it art, right? but it's about a (now) popular youtuber so it's entertainment? this is the grey area, where i don't know how to define my terms.

anyway, i sent the song to elmify and she genuinely liked it and promoted it in her next video. it went from approximately 200 something views to over 2000 views in just 3 or 4 days. my subscribership climbed from 50 to 71 in 3 days. this is just fascinating to me. elmify had about 2000 subscribers until the tweets (and also a plug from mitchelldavis) and is now up over 7000 in less than a week. what does this say about the power we give to "celebrities" to guide us? true, no one says "you have to subscribe" or "you have to listen". but we trust our celebrities as though they are leaders, and are more likely to test something out if they give it a thumbs up.

and so the twittersphere and facebook are filled with video promotions and twitpic plugs that cause the celebrities to be ever present in our minds. and because this new media allows so much apparent interaction (more on apparent in another post), it is truly as though we have a personal relationship with the celebrity. i believe this makes us even more likely to buy the t-shirts and mugs and shoes (rhett and link are now selling shoes- i guess t-shirts have been done to death).

i am really struggling with the whole monetization thing here. and maybe i'll post more about it later. but for now let me just say that i have extremely conflicted feelings about an industry that is based on selling things to 13-17 year-olds. that is the primary demographic. i realize television has been doing this forever and targeting younger kids. i was never happy about that, but i could mute the commercials or get a dvd and skip them all together. in this medium, we are bombarded by commercial content almost nonstop. it ain't very buddhist...