Hollywood and Vine

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Like punk and piercings and paintball before them, these videos seem to have been designed expressly to blow parental minds. Adults focus on the brevity. Noting that most of the popular material on YouTube is between two and seven minutes long, Ynon Kreiz, the president of Maker Studios—a leading multichannel network, or M.C.N., which aggregates channels to increase their ad revenues—told me, “I’m not sure the millennial generation has the patience to watch twelve, thirteen episodes of an hour-long show—even a half-hour show.”

Kids focus on the community. Digital stars are always in your pocket, always available for oversharing; because the viewing experience is so handheld and interstitial, it feels less like vegging with “NCIS” than like carrying around a newborn puppy. The viewing relationship is bilateral—digital stars take fans’ programming ideas and regularly answer their questions—and its promise is “I’m just like you.” Stardom used to be predicated on a mystique derived from scarcity; you don’t really know much about George Clooney. Now it’s predicated on a familiarity derived from ubiquity. As the teen-age beauty vlogger Bethany Mota exclaimed at VidCon, referring to her legion of subscribers, “I never thought I would have over six million best friends that are all around the world!”

Robert Kyncl, the global head of business and content at YouTube, told me, “People who grew up in an age of connected phones and cameras everywhere are self-aware at all times—they can’t escape it.” Digital stars look like Larry King’s grandkids: they have large heads, wide eyes, great teeth, and active hands, and they never blink or pause for breath lest they lose your attention. A chatty race of manga people, they stream their lives across multiple YouTube channels (one for outtakes and B-roll, one for live gaming, one for podcasts, etc.) as well as over Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, with merch available on each. Traditional entertainers call themselves actors or writers or directors or the “Blue’s Clues” guy. Digital talents, who often do all of the above—who learn Final Cut Pro and Photoshop from YouTube videos—call themselves “creators” or “influencers.” They don’t have to respond to executives’ notes or depend on a marketing division in Burbank. They just have to be radiant, humble, and terrific. The singer Meghan Tonjes introduced her set on VidCon’s main stage by calling out, “I love you all very much,” but it went without saying. YouTube, with its culture of D.I.Y. meets B.F.F., is how a generation admires itself.

“Within five years, YouTube will be the biggest media platform of any, by far, in the entire world,” Katzenberg told me. But the digital realm is no country for old men; younger, fleeter forms and stars are emerging faster and faster, and you almost can’t trust anyone over thirteen to understand them. YouTube’s primacy as the place teen-agers go after school is already being challenged, especially by Vine, an app of looping six-second videos that launched last year. AwesomenessTV’s biggest stars are the teen-age Viners Cam and Nash: Cameron Dallas and his friend Nash Grier, a rascal with antifreeze-blue eyes who, at sixteen, has ten million followers. Rob Fishman, the co-founder of Niche, a branding firm that connects Viners with advertisers, noted that, after only a few months on Vine, an unshaved account manager at his company “has more viewership than the New York Times has circulation.” Freddie Wong, a twenty-nine-year-old director who co-created “Video Game High School,” told me, “This world, even to me, is so vast and nuanced and incomprehensible it’s like the blind man feeling the elephant—a giant merry-go-round of teens chasing someone who’s famous for making six-second videos.”

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/ ... ywood-vine