If she attended UCLA, 25-year-old Tila Nguyen might get lost in the crowd. The Texas-raised model is a thin 4 feet 11 inches. She’s hardworking, intelligent and loves Los Angeles for the same reasons any other college-aged hottie would ““ the weather and the opportunities, of course.
But on the Internet, Nguyen is not just another face in the crowd. She is a celebrity.
“Let’s say MySpace.com is a high school. I might only have two or three close friends, but I am the most popular girl in school,” she said. “I was popular throughout my life.”
Nguyen, more famously known by her Internet alias Tila Tequila, has achieved the distinction as the MySpace user with the most friends ““ by far. Today, the Internet personality’s page registers almost 2 million network connections. On average, she receives a comment every five minutes.
Born in Singapore and raised in Houston, Texas, Nguyen is part of the new generation of star.
“A celebrity is someone who is widely known, who is a cultural reference point … typically associated with entertainment,” said UCLA communication studies Professor Tim Groeling. “Society likes to have a common set of cultural reference points it can draw upon.”
If Nguyen’s success is any indication, the Internet has become an epicenter for cultural reference points, even for raising the newest pop icon.
“Before the Internet, people wanted to be stars, but did not know how to get noticed. Now the Internet has given people a chance,” said Nguyen, who has posed for Maxim and Playboy while launching a career in singing ““ her true passion.
Simply put, celebrities such as Nguyen and the rising Los Angeles fashion icon Cory Kennedy are famous for being famous.
Unlike the MySpace goddess, the ubiquity of 17-year-old Kennedy, a normal middle-class teenager turned international fashion celebrity, was not a conscious choice.
In 2005, Santa Monica High School graduate Mark Hunter, a Los Angeles and New York nightlife photographer who goes by “the Cobra Snake,” snapped some shots of the young Kennedy at a Blood Brothers concert at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles. He posted the pictures to his site, www.thecobrasnake.com, and eventually fans were visiting just to see more of the fashionable young woman.
“The Internet is very immediate and has a huge reach. If this was 20 years ago, I would probably be putting out a photo zine and only a few people in L.A. would know about it,” Hunter said.
Instead, he explained, fashion bloggers first began to notice photos of the wistful Kennedy, posting links to his site on their sites. Almost instantly, and even more strangely, Kennedy became an Internet phenomenon.
“I don’t know why exactly (the Web site users) started looking at me instead of all the other girls. I think it’s just because of my eccentricity,” said Kennedy, the teenager whom Gawker.com once called an “Internet It Girl.”
Since then, Kennedy has had a cult following, complete with fans from around the world, a blog, a starring role in the YouTube video for Good Charlotte’s “Keep Your Hands Off My Girl,” and invitations to party with Lindsay Lohan and Vincent Gallo.
Through her online personality, Kennedy captures the most notable characteristics of modern America’s rising stars: youth and an idealized L.A. lifestyle. But her celebrity, Kennedy said, stems from her unwavering authenticity.
“People are drawn to how I’m actually real and not hiding anything. I’m not trying to be someone else. I’m just me having a good time and living my life how I want to live it. I think it gives people confidence because I have confidence in myself,” she said.
Though it may be impossible to maintain full-time Internet stardom as a college student, many UCLA students have also realized the power of fame that the Internet holds.
For example, fourth-year communication studies student, actress and singer Lauren Mayhew (“Raise Your Voice”), uses MySpace to promote her career. Also, the UCLA male video game-based a capella group, The Jumpmen, was approached by television station G4 to film an appearance on the show “Geek Out” after performing at Spring Sing in 2005 and posting a video on YouTube. Unfortunately, the show never aired.
“The Internet is so powerful because it’s the great equalizer. It’s a free marketplace of ideas where everyone has a voice,” said Chris Yi, third-year communication studies student. “But the best ideas rise to the top.”
Last spring, Yi posted a Korean-language mockery of the soap opera “Days of Our Lives” for his Korean 1A class. The video, which features Yi in a skirt as the female lead, has over 22,000 hits on YouTube and receives comments every week from users around the world.
“The Korean community definitely connected with it because it spoofed Korean dramas ““ and showcased my horrible Korean-speaking skills,” Yi said. “It’s all about finding the right niche audience.”
According to Groeling, many large businesses are turning more and more to the Internet as a means of gauging consumer interest. But with Internet celebrities, one is in essence selling a self-image. The personality has become the product.
“A lot of Internet celebrities are not necessarily motivated by translating what they do into real-space benefits. But here, just as within a lot of disciplines, fame is useful for them. … Name recognition becomes a factor,” Groeling said.
And the benefits are mutual. For example, if a record label searches MySpace for the newest indie rock band with the most comments, there is already a built-in audience if the label chooses to sign the musicians.
Just as Kennedy’s fame brought further success to the career of Hunter in return, the symbiotic relationship between Nguyen and MySpace, founded by UCLA alumnus Tom Anderson in 2003, exemplifies the inter-media, self-perpetuating power of the Web.
“I got kicked out of Friendster five times, so Tom found me and invited me over to MySpace,” Nguyen said.
“When I first joined (in 2003), I felt like a really big loser because no one else was there. But I was really vindictive toward Friendster, so I e-mailed 40,000 friends from my e-mail list and told them to move over and join MySpace. And overnight MySpace had 40,000 people.”
Like Kennedy, Nguyen recognizes the demand for Internet celebrities to be “real.”
“As long as you stay focused on yourself, people really sense who you are. People are very attracted to the realness,” she said.
And just as Nguyen was a pioneer for MySpace and Kennedy a mascot for teenage angst, they are both proving that the Internet star can cross the computer screen boundary and enter the entertainment medium from every angle, capitalizing on that all-important “name recognition.”
Nguyen is currently working on a single with the Black Eyed Peas’ Wil.i.am, recently filmed a movie with Adam Sandler, and continues to model as she searches for the right niche in the industry she is still learning to navigate.
Kennedy, younger in her career, currently has a column for the fashion magazine Nylon, has been working on several fashion spreads, and is eight months into her run as a subject of a documentary exploring the depths of rising pop culture icons.
The Internet has become a tool for stardom in a fast-paced, ever-changing international community. But success doesn’t come on a silver platter. Internet stars such as YouTube’s famous mock-blogger lonelygirl15 or the celebrity gossip guru Perez Hilton dedicated their careers to their online personalities.
The work of the Internet star may be unconventional, but it is a job. Like anything else, establishing that popularity and then translating it into real-world success takes effort.
“There are still millions of people out there trying. It’s not luck,” Nguyen said. “When I started I could have been like any other hot chick out there. You can start with hot photos, but you have to work hard. You don’t just put up pictures and say, “˜I’m famous.'”