Do we now treat celebs as tradeable goods? Yes, is the stock answer

As a journalist, when you don’t have a celebrity number in your phone book, you dive into a database. The one I use is Celebrity Intelligence. On it there are managers and agents and publicists listed, the whole apparatus of the celebrity machine. Your June Whitfields rub up against your Stormzys.

Except when I last logged on it had changed. It now has a new lead section, Influencer Intelligence, and instead of the digital equivalent of a celebrity Yellow Pages the site is now a pinboard of pictures, graphs and statistics.

I cocked my head. This looked less like a phone book, more like a stock-pickers’ website. Each celebrity was graded according to their social media statistics — little arrows saying whether they were rising and falling, full-on graphs of their social media highs and lows. There’s even an algorithm-driven equity index. If I drill a little deeper, will I begin to find pre-tax profits and price-to-earning ratios?

Why has this happened? Thirty or 40 years ago, the kid in the garage with a guitar will have had some idea that his or her music would have stirred the souls of the nation. A wannabe actor would have been hanging out at a drama club, not doing extra maths.

Celebrities themselves, as they peak in their careers, complain that their managers treat them like commodities. And yet now they are actively pursuing metrics.

The BBC used to run a website called Celebdaq, with an accompanying BBC3 series. With £10,000 of virtual cash you could buy and sell celebrity shares. It closed down in 2010 as part of a series of cost savings at the corporation.

What started out as a joke has become reality. Did they miss a trick by not going corporate and monetising it? And surely it is only a matter of time before the artistes of this world start paying dividends to up their numbers even further.

Best foot forward in the race to step up

Last week I mentioned I had sussed that the time difference between walking and taking the Tube or a bus was marginal, and that I had become an ardent pedestrian. It sparked a series of texts from friends reporting the number of steps they took that day, based on their smartphone and smart watches. It turns out that I know a tribe of walkers who measure their devotion to being a pedestrian in miles, steps and floors climbed.

Much money and time is spent on reminding us to breathe and drink water — to that we should now add putting one foot in front of another.

Irritated M.I.A wanted more from flick

M.I.A arrived at the Curzon Mayfair on Wednesday night, bedecked in Burberry and sat like an empress on stage, visibly irritated by the new movie made about her life, Matangi/Maya/M.I.A.

Some critics have called it a hagiography but this temperamental star still wanted more. At the Q&A, she grouched at the film-maker, saying he hadn’t included enough of her political activism. Her fame for songs such as Paper Planes has been equalled by notoriety for her rage against the world. One particular cause is the Tamils of Sri Lanka. She was a refugee from Sri Lanka’s civil war and her father was linked to the Tamil Tigers.

We think of pop stars as simple people. M.I.A, from a Tooting estate, with her activist attitude is not. With her record sales declining, she shouldn’t get angry about this thought-provoking film’s lukewarm reviews. Although she has been branded as crazy, and a terrorist sympathiser, history may judge her as a star who used her fame for something meaningful.

Do you want pain, or a page-turner?

The Man Booker Prize shortlist was announced at the Serpentine Pavilion last night, with six authors in search of an award. The usual boasting about how many of the shortlist you’ve read was a little muted as highly tipped Sally Rooney and Guy Gunaratne didn’t make it.

Chair of the judges Kwame Anthony Appiah was perhaps rather too proud of the high-minded list, saying each book was “an anatomy of pain”. In 2011, Stella Rimington chaired the judges and said she was aiming for “readability”.

There was an outcry. Let’s wait and see how the sales figures from this year and 2011 compare.