Marshall MacLuhan famously said “The medium is the message.”

Your opinion of Tom Green may vary depending on how and to what degree you have been exposed to Tom.  I have spent most of my life either too poor or too isolated to see his television shows.  I have seen some, but not all of the Hollywood movies that he has appeared in and I recognized his talent,  but I wasn’t a ‘Tom Green Fan’.

Very recently, my entertainment has been very much centered around the internet.  I was not an early adopter, but I wasn’t late either.  I was there to see when various things like chatrooms and forums had their period of being relevant and worthwhile and then devolving into depressing crapfests.  What I want to say is that there is always something intrinsic about a medium that will determine its content.  Inevitably, people with valuable voices abandon the media that cease to have value to them.

I rediscovered Tom Green on the ‘Blogosphere’.  Some semi-anonymous blogger posted an entry about the fact that Tom Green had posted a video of himself on the Tom Green blog giving out his personal cell phone number and waiting for people to call him.

That was my starting point on Tom’s Blog.  I have been pretty much hooked by the thing ever since.  There is a very interesting construct to his medium. He reads (probably not every) fan email and posts approved ones on one long page in the chronological order. He attaches his own comments to the bottom of some of them.  He also has his own blog page with his personal entries, many of them in video form.  When he has interesting jobs like covering the Olympics for the Tonight Show, his fans get to read about his off camera recreation, his impressions of the experience etc.. They get to see a video of him showing them what a hotel bathroom looks like in Italy. 

There are cases before the courts arguing that reality show producers are essentially script writers because they take hundreds of hours of raw footage and craft a compelling story line.  I think Tom’s fan emails are very much like that.  He is a big enough celebrity that he gets thousands of emails.  He is creating the impression of a community of fans with positive, quirky, cool attitudes through editing. There are just enough fawning superfans, just enough age cohort buddies, just enough 20 year old hot chicks, just enough self promoting jerks.  Only Tom Green knows what the real ratio is.

Beyond the creative power Tom gets from selecting emails, there is also the effect of this power on the submitters.  Actually, Tom posted an entry in his blog explaining to the useen masses (who were emailing him and then sending emails complaining about not being posted) exactly what it takes to get an email posted.  Contrary to what he said in this post, he does post some emails that are almost iconically lame.

Now, Tom’s blogs have evolved even further.  He now gives out deputy blogs to people who demonstrate the proper attitude and ability on the fan email blog.  I’m not sure how this will turn out; it has essentially created a hole in the creative filter that is Tom Green.

I am fascinated with his blog because it is personal and largely positive and it is encouraging other people to get personal.  Tom Green is having fun playing with a medium of entertainment and communication and a lot of people want to play with him. 

His Blog…

Tom Green