‘..where attention flows…..’ : Jeremy Lin

‘….I have suggested that money
increasingly flows to those who get attention. It is simply that attention-payers
(or fans) are willing to do much that attention receivers (or stars) want,
including, often paying them or sending them money, or simply sending
money to something such as a charity that the star supports.”

-Michael H. Goldhaber

  Like many people in America (and the world as you’ll see), I followed the Jeremy Lin ‘Linsanity’ attention wave closely during its arc this past Spring. Lin is one of many ‘stars’ coming into some fame during this attention era. Without going into all the details of Lin’s bio, the gist of the Jeremy Lin attention wave is this:

   A stereotypical Asian man plays the game of basketball in a non-stereotypical way.

  There, I said it. Much has been made of Lin’s ancestry ( he’s Taiwanese) ; his education (went to Harvard) ; and his struggles to remain in the NBA (got cut 3 times). That’s material for a great book. In fact, a few  biographies  have  already been written:

The truth, however, is that Jeremy Lin, through no conscious intentions, lucked into becoming a ‘star’. As I’ve written before, there are two essentials for stardom: a platform, and a ‘performance’. Jeremy Lin is an athlete, who happens to be of Taiwanese descent, Ivy League educated, and a ‘point guard’ ; things which are all uncommon in the NBA. So, Jeremy Lin is a ‘unique’ individual, with a stage upon which to display his talents.  That’s rule 1 for stardom.

Rule 2 is of course, 'performance'. Part of the motivation for this post is the recent news that Lin might be leaving the ‘..bright lights of Broadway,’ as Stephen A. Smith (himself a star) said in this ESPN Youtube clip:

Jeremy Lin joined the New York Knicks last summer, after a brief stint in his ‘hometown’ team, the Golden State Warriors. He was an unknown at that point, and would remain so until the night of  February 4, 2012, when the young Point Guard scored 25 points in a 7 point win over the ‘rival’ New
Jersey Nets
:

Lin continued his outstanding offensive output for the next 3 weeks, his ‘debutante’s ball’ coming in a 38-point performance on an ESPN-covered Friday night win over Kobe Bryant’s LA Lakers. ‘Linsanity’ had reached its peak; a star had ‘arrived’.




reprinted from the Washington Post:

Jeremy Lin, a celebration

By Alexandra Petri

Go Jeremy go! (Frank Gunn – AP)

Much is wrong in the world today. Primaries. Scandals. Economic turmoil. War. General discord. It is all deeply serious, and we will have to go back to talking about it soon enough.

But first, let’s take a moment to acknowledge one truth on which everyone can agree: Jeremy Lin is amazing.

This is an incontestable fact. Jeremy Lin is the best story these days, in sports or out of it.

If you aren’t living under a rock where the ESPN reception is spotty, you have heard this before. It’s the tale of the 23-year-old Harvard graduate, unsought by Division I basketball recruiters, not drafted, benched by the Knicks until the 11th hour — and then unleashed, to score 136 points in five starts (more than anyone since the ABA-NBA merger, as our actual sports columnist points out) and lead the Knicks to a string of six victories. He’s magic. He’s like Midas, but everything he touches turns to really excellent basketball.

I have nothing to add. For me to compliment or criticize an athlete would be like Beethoven complimenting or criticizing a piece of rock music. After he went deaf, that is. I know nothing about basketball. The only thing I know about basketball is that it’s something I wasn’t particularly good at in the eighth grade, which does not narrow things down particularly.

But watching Jeremy Lin play, I almost feel as though I understand the game.

If only I were as good at praising Jeremy Lin as Jeremy Lin is at playing basketball, this would be the Greatest Ode of All Time, and you would love it and be impressed by it no matter your creed or heritage or political persuasion, unless you were Floyd Mayweather, about whom the less said the better.

If all of us were as good at what we do as he is, the world would be an incredible place, although robberies would be a lot more efficient.

It will come almost as a relief to me when Lin stops playing Insane, Superhuman Basketball and starts playing merely Really Excellent Human-Level Basketball. To sustain this sheer level of perfection is — mind-boggling. I have no words! And I never run out of words, a quality that does little to endear me to people at cocktail parties. But in Lin’s case, I am content to gape silently and bow in homage.

It feels strange to wax semi-lyrical about someone who was in my college graduating class. But this Lin phenomenon is like discovering too late that you went to school with Zeus — a friendly, pleasant Zeus who was outstanding at basketball and never attempted to do weird things to swans. And you were too big an idiot to show up at any of Zeus’s basketball games. Now you have to pay twenties of dollars for the privilege, and it serves you right. True, you never went to any sports games, except once when you wandered into a hockey game by accident, mistaking it for experimental theater. And it took you a whole act to realize your mistake.

This is different. Someone quipped that this is the only time people have ever been surprised by the success of an Asian-American Harvard graduate. But no one thinks of Harvardians as being good at sports. The only time the Big H won at football was in the era when no other schools had teams. And no one expects this level of excellence. So Lin’s success really is expectation-shattering — and beautiful.

But to borrow a bit of the Gettysburg Address, what Jeremy Lin does on the court is far above my poor power to add or to detract.

He makes me proud to be an American. This national pride would not happen in France, mainly because basketball does not seem very big there.

Of course we’re Linsane. He is someone who almost didn’t get the chance to prove what he could do. And then he did — and it was incredible. That’s the American dream, in a nutshell — to get the chance to show what you can do, and to do it so well that everyone stands up and cheers wildly.

When he made that three-point game-winning shot with 0.5 seconds on the clock on Tuesday night against the Toronto Raptors, even the Raptors fans cheered. (Are there Raptors fans?)

You can’t do anything but cheer.

It’s telling that the above post was written by a Ms. Alexandra Petri, who is not – as she readily admits – a ‘sports columnist’. She’s an ‘opinion blogger’:

An so, one week after the 38-point performance against Kobe and the Lakers, when everyone with eyes had an opinion on the ‘Linsanity’ wave, Ms. Petri chimed in with her two cents. Fine. That post, written at the height of interest in Lin, was, for Ms. Petri, ‘the thing’ to do at that time. For as with anything in the attention era (remember zombie apocalypse?), there is no telling how long any wave will last. As we would find out, the ‘Linsanity’ wave would die out fairly quickly.

Lin would not score more than 30 points again for the rest of the season. His offensive production would decline steadily after the dramatic victory over the Lakers. The low-point for Lin came  in a horrendous 1-for-11 performance (8 points) as his Knicks got blown out by Lebron’s Miami Heat.  The magic had gone, and Jeremy Lin’s dream life had been slapped into focus: he was not (yet) a superstar.

And that was the problem. During  ‘Linsanity’, I had joked to friends that Lin should ‘..start a Youtube channel,’ right away. I was only partly joking. For I could see that, while Lin was certainly a star, and could definitely ‘ball’, there was no way that he would keep up his outrageous performance for another 4 months. Statistics would take care of that. I was certain that for Lin to remain a star, he would need some other outlet to keep himself relevant. Taking for granted that his relevance basketball-wise would soon level off and settle at a more ‘normal’ level, Lin would need to distance himself from the stage of the NBA. His performances on that stage were to a large extent out of his control. Something like a YT channel would have been a perfect ‘attention scam’ for Lin.

But he did tweet, right? Well, yeah, Lin did – and still does – tweet. But as the ‘Occupy Movement’ showed, your tweets are really only as relevant as you are. Twitter is a ‘star-fan-interaction’ medium, most useful as a sort of chat room. Lin’s tweets are mostly one-way; him tweeting something or other, that will show up in his ‘followers’ feed at some point. In other words, Twitter does not make one a star, or keep anyone relevant. Because it is a star-fan relationship, there is really no incentive to ‘perform’ on twitter. The lack of any visual stimuli also means there is an element of secrecy (and therefore distrust) to the medium, unless there is a conversant quality to a star’s tweets. To date, Lin has about 900k followers. His last tweet was five days ago;

As the Google Insights graph shows, most of the hype surrounding Jeremy Lin had died out just about the time his team got crushed by the Miami Heat. He had a number of decent-to-good  performances  during the month of March, and then suffered a tragic knee injury that ended his season.

 

But the saga continues. Fast-forward to Sunday, July 15, and Lin is back on the attention radar. This time, it concerns the reality that the ‘star’ Point Guard has agreed to a lucrative contract offer from the Houston Rockets.

There is a lively debate in New York about whether or not it is wise for the Knicks – who can match the contract offer – to allow ‘Linsanity’ to leave Gotham. There are many who feel it is foolish to do this, as indeed, many of Lin’s ‘fans’ have started an online petition to keep Lin in New York:

Applying an attention-centric point-of-view to this latest Lin story, I came to the conclusion that the behavior of the Houston Rockets proves the heading quotation correct: where attention flows, money will follow. For the fans of Lin who started the petition, their passion it to be lauded, but in truth, they’re clueless. The issue in this latest Lin saga has to do with whether or not Jeremy Lin is worth about 8m dollars a season for the next 3 years. Clearly, the Knicks have reason to believe that answer is ‘no’.

The Knicks management are not ‘fans’ of Lin. They feel content in the knowledge that the ‘New York Knickerbockers’ organization is the real ‘star’ of Madison Square Garden. Sure, the ready-made marketability of Lin is a plus, but in an age where technology allows the biggest stars to be digitally consumed by millions, his presence in New York is not necessary.

But the Houston Rockets are taking a gamble. They have become ‘fans’ of Lin, and are behaving as such. They are throwing money in the direction of a ‘star’, as a show of appreciation for whatever it is they think he is. Whether or not they’ll be let down when they see him up close remains to be seen. Regardless of what happens however, Lin should still consider that Youtube channel……