The Netflix documentary, FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, allows the audience to dive into the madness and messiness of the terribly unsuccessful music festival in the Bahamas. What was once argued to be “the biggest event of the decade”, became an utter joke and a massive viral disgrace (Smith, 2019).
In this blog post, I will discuss the most important takeaways from this documentary. More specifically, I will highlight the prominent role of influencers, the dangers to instant communication, and the overarching idea of hype. The epic fail of the Fyre Festival can not solely be blamed on Billy McFarland, for this documentary interviews all the key players involved in this fraudulent festival.
In the beginning, Fyre became widely known by their incredibly orchestrated promo video. Within the documentary by Smith (2019), one argued that the promo video was more of a party for “the titans of the modeling industry”. The celebrities hired to promote this “private” island had an overwhelming sense of power. P. David Marshall (2014), an expert in celebrity culture, explains that “like the prophet’s power, the celebrity’s formative power rests with the people as an expression of popular culture and social will.” Evidently, Billy McFarland and his right-hand man, Ja Rule, believed that the Fyre Festival would gain traction, in addition to their target audience, by infiltrating the hired celebrities and influencers’ communities.
In order to continue writing this blog post, I want to take a step back and provide a definition of an influencer crafted by Crystal Abidin (2015).
Influencers are everyday, ordinary Internet users who accumulate a relatively large following on blogs and social media through the textual and visual narration of their personal lives and lifestyles, engage with their following in digital and physical spaces, and monetise their following by integrating “advertorials” into their blog or social media posts.
The idea of intimacy is another key ingredient of being a successful influencer. “The allure of influencers is premised on the ways they engage with their followers to give the impression of exclusive, intimate exchange” (Abidin, 2015). Unjustly, Billy McFarland, used an influencers’ closeness with their fans to mislead them into purchasing tickets for this festival.
Unfortunately, the influencers and celebrities involved in this Fyre Festival nonsense, suffered undeserved consequences as a result of false promotion. After the fall out of the Fyre Festival, several influencers were faced with the fear of losing their fan’s trust and intimacy. For example, Bella Hadid (2017) issued an apology statement that said, “I initially trusted this would be an amazing & memorable experience for all of us, which is why I agreed to do one promotion... not knowing about the disaster that was to come.”
So, let’s talk about the orange tile. The social media strategy of the orange tile was a way to promote the Fyre Festival by disrupting the flow of one’s “daily” instagram feed. The ability to convince the most famous influencers, such as Bella Hadid and Hailey Baldwin, to post the bright orange tile is what, in essence, built the entire festival (Smith, 2019). However, one kid with an estimate of 400 followers posted a picture of cheese on toast from the festival that spread like wildfire. Ultimately, this one post brought the Fyre Festival to its demise.
Instant communication, especially through popular social media avenues, can be widely dangerous. By simply reflecting on both the orange tile and the picture of cheese on toast, it is apparent that the Fyre Festival didn’t believe in transparency. Billy McFarland had an inability to manage the festival-goers expectations. The Fyre website, along with their social media account, continued to post unrealistic housing options and recycle footage from the first promotional videos (Smith, 2019). A key interviewee in Smith’s documentary (2019), Marc Weinstein, touches on a key theme emerging from the digital world: conflicts of honesty. Weinstein said to the camera, “I was going through the hardest experience of my life and yet if you had seen it, you would have been like, “wow what a great life this guy lives.” He’s living in the Bahamas, going to beaches all day.” The Fyre Festival is the extremity of what happens when instant communication outlets masks over the truth and promotes the impossible.
The documentary’s title captures the entity of hype. FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened. Devon Power’s, author of On Trend: The Business of Forecasting the Future (University of Illinois Press, 2019), describes hype as “ is a state of anticipation generated through the circulation of promotion, resulting in a crisis of value” (p. 863). In my opinion, the Fyre Festival is the most clear cut example of hype. The Fyre Festival was supposed to be “the coolest party that you had ever seen advertised”, “the biggest event in a decade”, “a chance to live like Pablo Escobar” (Smith, 2019). There is an energy and a belief system that hype also captures. Hype, in many ways, is so impactful that it is extremely hard to stop falsely promoting the festival to the public. But as we all know now, none of this immense hype around the festival proved to be true. The Fyre Festival was an attempt to bring Instagram to life-to gather celebrities, influencers, and the average person in America (Jillionare, 2019). It’s hard to imagine that regardless of Billy McFarland’s mistakes, secrets, and lies, that this festival could have ever been soaring success.
References
Marshall, P. D. (2014). Tools for the analysis of the celebrity as a form of cultural power. Pp. 51-
76 in Celebrity and Power. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
76 in Celebrity and Power. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Abidin, C. (2015). Communicative <3 intimacies: Influencers and perceived interconnectedness. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, & Technology8. Retrieved from: http://adanewmedia.org/2015/11/issue8-abidin/
Powers, D. (2019). On trend: The business of forecasting the future. Champaign, IL: University
of Illinois Press. Smith, D. (2019).
of Illinois Press. Smith, D. (2019).
FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened. The United States: Netflix.
I think it is so interesting that you tied the concept of “hype” to the phenomenon of the Fyre Festival. Though this connection had never occurred to me, I can see how intrinsically related these two ideas are. The fact that the Fyre Festival only gained popularity and attention from “hype” through instant communication/social media and was intentionally promoted by well-known influencers shows how compelling these “advertorials” can be and how much influence these “micro-celebrities” actually have. The only reason the Fyre Festival was even paid attention to was because of the influencers that advertised and endorsed it. Moreover, I think it is so interesting how this situation shows that it only took “micro-celebrities” to make something seem legitimate and reliable. In my opinion, it would also be interesting to connect this situation to the other part of Power’s lecture, the premise of “cool-hunting” (Powers 2019). Though not directly linked, the occurrence (or lack thereof) of the Fyre Festival is a sort of converse to the process of “cool-hunting.” In Malcolm Gladwell’s article, “The Coolhunt,” he explains how DeeDee Gordon and Baysie Wightman went searching through a variety of neighborhoods and spoke to a myriad of people--people of all different ages, genders, income-backgrounds, etc.--to find what is going to be the next “cool” thing (1997). Rather than influencers being top-down and dictating what is “cool” or what should be desirable in popular society (for example, attendance at the Fyre Festival), what is actually “cool” came from regular, ordinary people, and not ordinary as in the definition of micro-celebrity (Abidin 2015). What is “cool” came from the people without a large or well-known following who are not advertising anything (Gladwell 1997). Though this article predates the popularity of social media, it illustrates how popular culture once did originate in a reverse scale, from bottom to top, which perhaps highlights a shift in the “hype” process. Perhaps it used to follow a low culture to popular culture pattern, and now, due to popular influencers embedded in high culture, such as models like Bella Hadid, it follows a high culture to popular culture course.
ReplyDeleteAbidin, C. (2015). Communicative <3 Intimacies: Influencers and Perceived Interconnectedness.
Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, & Technology. Retrieved from https://adanewmedia.org/2015/11/issue8-abidin/
Gladwell, M. (1997). The Coolhunt. The New Yorker.
Powers, D. (2019). On Trend: The Business of Forecasting the Future. Champaign, IL:
University of Illinois Press.