Girls just want to go viral

It was a Monday when Benni Cinkle, a 14-year-old high school student from Anaheim Hills, Calif., received a text message from her classmate Rebecca Black saying that an unofficial fan page devoted to Cinkle had popped up on Facebook. This was just a week after the amateur video for Black’s now-infamous song, “Friday,” in which Cinkle had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo, began its viral Internet ascent.

Cinkle, who agreed to appear in the video with the expectation that no one would actually see it, was shocked by the news. By her own admission, she was just “that girl in pink who sits behind Rebecca in the car for four seconds and was a terrible dancer.”
When she first checked out her fan page that morning in March, there were already 2,000 followers. By the time she came home from school, there were 10 times as many. By Friday, the total had reached 75,000.

So Cinkle did what our current age of social media requires of those swept up in the viral undertow: She jumped into the fray with haste. First, she set up an official Tumblr page to keep track of the rapid proliferation of animated GIFS that had sprung up showcasing her all-thumbs dance moves.

Two days later, she established a “Benni Cinkle (Girl Dancing Awkwardly – Official Page)” on Facebook. Next came her own YouTube channel, where she posted a video blog FAQ addressing a range of popular inquiries from her new fans, including the gossipy (“Are you still friends with Rebecca Black?” No.) and the inane (“How long is your driveway?” 128 feet.)

After that, she posted a clip of a flash-mob dance she organised at the local mall, created an official Web page, thatgirlinpink.com; rebranded her Twitter account; and even began offering her own Internet Survival Guide, free to download after submitting your email address. In less than a month, Benni Cinkle had gone from an anonymous high school student to micro-celebrity.

Cinkle is not unique. Online fame is becoming just another aspect of teenage life for a generation raised on reality television and the perpetual flurry of status updates that ping across their smartphones, tablets and computer screens.

Not only have sites like YouTube made it possible for numerous unknown adolescents to be discovered – Greyson Chance, a 13-year-old from Oklahoma, got a record deal after Ellen DeGeneres mentioned his YouTube piano version of Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi” on her talk show, for instance – but youngsters with no special talent, like Cinkle, are drawing mass followings as well.

Teens without talent

Trevor Michaels, 12, better known as iTr3vor, has received more than 5.5 million views on his YouTube channel for hyperactive dance moves he performs at various Apple stores when his mother takes him shopping at the mall. (He uploads videos of the dances on the spot.)

Then there are the legions of girls who post “haul” videos, short clips of themselves chattering about their most recent fashion and makeup purchases. The spots are unwatchable to most any adult, but they draw in hundreds of thousands of girls in their teens or younger who are eager to duplicate the shopping habits of their peers.
YouTube estimates more than one-third of the most successful participants in its revenue-sharing Partner Program are under 25.

For every success story, there are thousands of other teenagers poised and eager to seize their own moment, should it come. “Every teenager is already creating unique content for a multitude of social media accounts,” said Valerie Veatch, a filmmaker.
But managing the teenage celebrity industrial complex, on and offline, calls for a strategy that young people, parents and schools are grappling to figure out. Cinkle says her life is “definitely different now” since the “Friday” music video went viral.

Not all the attention is positive. With the Internet’s contempt-inducing anonymity, the bigger one’s digital profile, the more susceptible one is to negative attention. “My first instinct was, is there any way to protect against attacks like this?” Pati Cinkle said. But for her daughter’s generation, the anxiety and fear over trolling is increasingly old hat.
“There were many people saying mean things, but there were also thousands supporting me,” the younger Cinkle said. “I decided to focus on the good things, and make the whole dancing thing a joke.”

For Megan Parken, a 15-year-old video blogger from Austin, Texas, the ramifications of fame have been more radical. Parken, who has almost 300,000 subscribers to her YouTube channel meganheartsmakeup, began uploading makeup tutorials, shopping hauls and “life-advice stuff,” as she puts it, to YouTube during the summer before she entered eighth grade. When the videos caught fire, she started treating them like an extracurricular activity. She quit cheerleading “so I had enough time to devote to my channel,” she said.

At first, she tried to keep her life on YouTube a secret from her classmates. But with an average of 100,000 views per video, it was the worst-kept secret in school. Several of her classmates, whom Parken calls “the mean girls,” would tease her about her enormous online audience because it consisted largely of younger girls.

Soon she was quitting more than cheerleading. The money-making opportunities from participating in YouTube’s partner program and from the companies whose brands she mentioned were so great that she decided to quit high school entirely after ninth grade and enroll in online courses at the University of Texas, with the full support of her parents.

“The financial opportunity is incredible,” said her mother, Susan Parken. “She has saved enough money to buy her first car” and has put away money for college.
A new study conducted at UCLA by the Children’s Digital Media Center(AT)LA underscores the increasing cultural importance of fame among young people. The study examined the values conveyed in popular pre-teenage television shows in the four decades from 1967 through 2007.

The study found fame to be the No. 1 value communicated by shows in 2007. In each of the previous years – 1997, 1987, 1977 and 1967 – it ranked near the bottom of a list of 16 values. Community feeling, or being part of a group, ranked No. 1 or 2 in those years.