Reading through Celebrity Inc. I was rather surprised and disappointed to discover how ruthless and manipulative some people could be with the publicity of their relationships especially when fame is the reward. Pratt and Montag’s manipulation of both their public presence and relationship, making money off of both, seems a bit inhuman and greedy. I also didn’t realize that people would be willing to stage pictures of themselves solely for the purpose of making money. Reading about Pratt and Montag’s celebrity careers and how short lived it seemed in comparison with other A-list celebrities. The overall comparison between A-list celebrities and D-list reality TV stars was interesting especially in terms of their shelf life. From Pratt and Montag’s story, we could see that reality TV stars do not have a long celebrity shelf life, losing their relevance within a year or so and then having to sell themselves out in order to stay relevant. This practice of celebrities selling themselves continues on to today, and now it seems to be through sponsorships and paid public appearances.
Ashton Kutcher’s story is also rather enlightening in the beginning of the monetization of social media for celebrities. I had known that he had been an early proponent for social media, but I didn’t quite realize how odd that would have been at the time: an A-list celebrity eagerly entering the Internet, a place that many other celebrities had not even thought to consider as an avenue for monetization. It was interesting reading the responses of other big Internet/social media figures to Kutcher’s interest in the Internet. Their testing of his and Goldberg’s interest and ability to keep up seems rather odd but totally understandable. In reflection, it’s crazy how far the Internet and social media have come since then. It was only in the past 5 years or so that many TV networks finally adopted the Internet as another platform to publish/republish their content. With many TV shows uploading clips of the full show onto YouTube. A-list celebrities have also embraced social media, populating the Internet with somewhat older audiences and introducing themselves to younger audiences that might not know of them.