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"Did celebrity last longer in 1929, 1992 or 2009? We investigate the phenomenon of fame by mining a collection of news articles that spans the twentieth century, and also perform a side study on a collection of blog posts from the last 10 years. By analyzing mentions of personal names, we measure each person's time in the spotlight, using two simple metrics that evaluate, roughly, the duration of a single news story about a person, and the overall duration of public interest in a person. We watched the distribution evolve from 1895 to 2010, expecting to find significantly shortening fame durations, per the much popularly bemoaned shortening of society's attention spans and quickening of media's news cycles. Instead, we conclusively demonstrate that, through many decades of rapid technological and societal change, through the appearance of Twitter, communication satellites, and the Internet, fame durations did not decrease, neither for the typical case nor for the extremely famous, with the last statistically significant fame duration decreases coming in the early 20th century, perhaps from the spread of telegraphy and telephony. Furthermore, while median fame durations stayed persistently constant, for the most famous of the famous, as measured by either volume or duration of media attention, fame durations have actually trended gently upward since the 1940s, with statistically significant increases on 40-year timescales. Similar studies have been done with much shorter timescales specifically in the context of information spreading on Twitter and similar social networking sites. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first massive scale study of this nature that spans over a century of archived data, thereby allowing us to track changes across decades. "
"Sometimes, you don’t need big theories or newly published books in order to understand what’s going on around you. You certainly don’t need to listen to someone who would feel the need to prove he’s clever by calling himself “Chief of Confusion.” And you don’t need to wait for history to help you out, either. Some things are eternal truths. I vote to reject both theories. Instead, to understand what OSW protesters are about, I propose people simply listen to a few lines from “Everybody Knows,” sung by the smokey-voiced Leonard Cohen"
What motivates young adults to start using the popular microblogging site Twitter? Can we identify any systematic patterns of adoption or is use of the service randomly distributed among internet users of this demographic? Drawing on unique longitudinal data surveying 505 diverse young American adults about their internet uses at two points in time (2009, 2010), this article looks at what explains the uptake of Twitter during the year when the site saw considerable increase in use. We find that African Americans are more likely to use the service as are those with higher internet skills. Results also suggest that interest in celebrity and entertainment news is a significant predictor of Twitter use mediating the effect of race among a diverse group of young adults. In contrast, interest in local and national news, international news, and politics shows no relationship to Twitter adoption in this population segment.
fame, wealth, beauty, genius, power
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The basic idea is that in a competitive market, the owner of a resource — be it hours of labor with a particular skill, or hours of a celebrity’s glamour that can be shared with others, or a piece of capital equipment, or a natural resource — will be paid for it an amount equal to the value that one unit of that resource, added to those already employed, would contribute in the form of valuable output that the rest of society is willing to pay for.
Economists call this marginal value not because it is trivial, but because it is the value added by one unit of the resource (for example, one year’s labor) at the margin of an already existing number of units employed. This theory makes a subtle point not always well understood by non-economists.
While collectively, members of a profession may add immense total social value to the rest of society, each member’s income tends to be determined by the value contributed only by the last unit added to that pool of professionals.
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A pediatrician does, of course, add high value to each patient, but each pediatrician only to a limited number of them. By contrast, Bristol Palin may add only a bit of joy and excitement to each person who watches or reads her, but it is a very large number of people and that adds up quickly to a high social value, as economists define that term.
Thus all celebrities, however accomplished, can earn so much more a year than most highly skilled professionals who are in more plentiful supply (or who just do not care to market themselves to the highest bidder for their talent).
"She has fucked up everything, burned everyone, and somehow escaped punishment. She is the one who embraces and embodies that corruption, and fucking revels in it because she has no choice, and this flashes in every corrupt second of her songs. Ke$ha is the poet of moral hazard."
"What do people want from Sheen? I’m not denying he has drug and alcohol problems—or even that he might struggle with mental illness. But so do a lot of people in Hollywood who hide it much better—or who the celebrity press just doesn’t care enough about. What fascinates us is the hedonism he enjoys and that remains the envy of every man—if only women weren’t around to keep them liars. (His supposed propensity for violence against women hasn’t hurt his popularity with female fans either.) Do we really want manners? Civility? Empire courtesy? Hell, no. We want reality, no matter how crazy. And this is what drives the Empire to distraction: Sheen doesn’t care what you think of him anymore, and he scoffs at the idea of PR. “Hey, suits, I don’t give a shit.” That’s his only commandment. Sheen blows open the myth that if men try hard enough, they will outgrow the adolescent pursuit of pleasure and a life without rules or responsibilities."
"Ellis, ever the Zeitgeist Whisperer, was right to catch wind of a backlash against the current prominence of recovery in pop culture, from Lindsay Lohan's neverending courtroom drama to Karl Lagerfeld's "quotation" of alcohol-detector ankle bracelets in a recent fashion show. The transformative storyline of recovery, so perfectly attuned to the rhythms of modern-day fame, not to mention the crash-and-burn arc of VH1's Behind the Music, has become the most prominent celebrity narrative, a myth of hubris and redemption, in which the modern-day Prometheus is struck down at the height of their acclaim, spirited down to the underworld to do battle with their demons, before emerging victorious and chastened, a new album clamped under their armpit, with liners notes that thank God and say things like "Here are the songs that mark my journey." "
"The most fascinating part of the Black story is that she’s actually famous now, which was exactly the reason her parents gave $2,000 to ARK Music Factory in the first place. From Black herself on her unlikely fame, “I think that’s an accomplishment you know, even a person who doesn’t like it, it’s going to be stuck in their head. So that’s the point of it, it’s a catchy song.” Exactly.
Get used to this kind of stuff. As society advances technologically, culture becomes a parody of itself, and we enjoy the parody, intentional or not, more than anything sincere. But what becomes of the Antoine Dobsons and the Rebecca Blacks, our Internet culture folk heroes?"
Comment on the Bill James article about talent in Topeka.
"You may choose which side of this argument you wish to squat upon, but I am on the (b) side; it is my very strong belief that there is talent everywhere and all the time, but that London at that time was very, very good at calling out the literary talent of its citizenry, whereas most places and most times are not nearly so effective along this line. I believe that there is a Shakespeare in Topeka today, that there is a Ben Jonson, that there is a Marlowe and a Bacon, most likely, but that we are unlikely ever to know who these people are because our society does not encourage excellence in literature. That's my opinion."
Say the name Knut Hamsun, on the other hand, and the first thing in your head is probably “Nazi.” Not Hunger. Not “brilliant Norwegian writer,” but “Nazi.” And while our reaction should be one of disgust, the fact that Hamsun was in his doddering old age showing signs of mental decline even before he went all rah-rah Hitler (he was 80 at the time Germany invaded Norway) — whereas Céline was an intelligent, mentally competent writer in the bloom of youth — it makes you wonder how arbitrary are these reactions.
"On the contrary: Charlie Sheen is the tired face of the American dream, in ways that we don't often enough have the backbone, wisdom, or grace to (want to) admit, starting with a hilariously bankrupt definition of "success."
What's wrong with this stunted definition? It's simply, simplistically about zero-sum, near-term WINNING — in a way that chronically, systemically undervalues the future, nature, other people, society, and even our own selves."
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