by Ryan Baldwin
Julia Allison is a bona fide celebrity icon – and I mean that in the truest sense of the word. Unlike some of her infamous counterparts, Julia’s luminary status has been achieved without duping, disgusting or selling out to the viewing public. And even though none of us actually knows Julia in “real life,” she is possibly more real to her fans than most of her fans’ Facebook friends are to each other.
Let me back up. Four years ago, Julia was not much different from you and me. According to her personal bio, she got her start as a columnist at Georgetown University (Class of 2004) while earning a “spectacularly unprofitable degree” in Political Science. She then moved to New York City to become a writer, and, after being rejected from a job at Bath & Body Works, finally managed to convince an editor at the Manhattan newspaper AM New York to begin running her weekly dating columns. This proved to be Julia’s “Big Apple” break.
For the past three years, to be sure, Julia has been living a writer’s dream. Her columns have been published in Cosmopolitan, Maxim, New York magazine, The Huffington Post, Page Six, Marie Claire UK, Teen Vogue, Seventeen, Capitol File, and Men’s Health, among others. She has made over 350 on-air appearances in the past year alone, including CNN, MSNBC, Vh1, Fox, E!, CBS, NBC, CW, FoxNews, FoxBusiness, Fuse, G4 and others.
Julia has a Facebook account, a Myspace page, a Flickr account, a Twitter address, a Friendfeed, four Tumblrs, three blogs, two Vimeos, one YouTube account and a photogenic white shih-tzu named Marshmallow. Plastered on Julia’s social networking sites are complimentary quotes from popular media figures, including Michael Wilbon of ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption, who went as far as to call Julia “an American original.”
And it’s this label as “an American original” that makes Julia’s rise to stardom so incredibly fascinating.
In an earlier post I wrote that 21st century America has become saturated and polluted by phoniness, including: embellished social network profiles, fake blogs, and phony online diaries; performance enhancing drugs like anabolic steroids and amphetamines; fabricated memoirs like A Million Little Pieces and Love and Consequences; and even the questionable tear shed by Hillary Clinton.
However, what separates Julia Allison from this pack of wanna-be phonies is, quite simply, her authenticity. Jason Tanz with Wired magazine likewise values the legitimacy of her celebrity, as he writes, “She’s not an actress or a singer or a misbehaving heiress to a hotel fortune. She hasn’t recoded any meme-ready videos like Tay ‘Chocolate Rain’ Zonday or Tron Guy or the ‘Leave Britney Alone!’ dude. She doesn’t flaunt tech knowledge like bloggers Robert Scoble or Dave Winer… . Allison is the latest, and perhaps purest, iteration of the Warholian ideal: someone who is famous for being famous.”
Moreover, to those who dismiss Julia Allison as little more than a rank narcissist, Tanz responds:
Admit it: you’ve spent a good half hour trying to pick out the most flattering photo to upload to your MySpace page. You struggle to come up with the mot juste to describe your Facebook status. You keep a bank of self-portraits on Flickr or an online scrapbook on Tumblr or a running log of your daily musings on Blogger. You strategically court the gatekeepers at StumbleUpon or Digg. You compare the size of your Twitter-subscriber rolls to those of your friends. You set up Google Alerts to tell you whenever a blogger mentions your name. See? Self-promotion is no longer solely the domain of egotists and professional aspirants. Anyone can be a personal branding machine.
In the end, Julia Allison may be a bona fide online celebrity - or a celebrated digital narcissist, as some claim - BUT, she is also just a girl, sitting in front of a computer, asking it to love her. And, in that sense, we are all digital narcissists.
