Fame: The Social Currency

Merit doesn’t drive celebrity. A good story does. It gives us a common topic to feed our hunger for connection. That’s why, according to a couple of studies, some people are famous for just being famous.   

Researchers at Stanford University compared baseball players (since there are clear measures of their abilities). Even if players were well past their prime, fame drove conversations, not achievement. 

There are applications here to business and other corners of society. One of the researchers says, “It is critical to remember that the most prominent people in your organization are not always the ones producing the highest-quality work; they might just be better at selling themselves."

Read more about the study here. 

Stephen Goforth

Fame

Leonardo da Vinci agreed with Young Thug about celebrity being life's game-changing apex, and he further believed that the rich and powerful, by pursuing land and money, miss the whole point of existence. “How many emperors and how many princes have lived and died and no record of them remains, and they only sought to gain dominions and riches that their fame might be everlasting?”   

The internet is a sprawling and anarchic record. In a few decades the internet has swallowed the record, and become coextensive with it. When no trace of something exists online, can it be said to be famous? Inconceivable. Can it be said to even exist? “Pics or it didn't happen” is a stock response to an improbable story told online. To become history, experience must first become pixels.  

Virginia Heffernan writing in Wired 

Fleeting Fame

The record, whether carved in stone or bits of data, is arbitrary in the extreme. To endow with fame and fortune women with big lips or people who hurl themselves over a bar on a bendy pole—while skipping over people who, say, can build houses or make meringues—suggests that fame and game don't rhyme only by accident. Fame comes to those whose accomplishments are recorded, and the “record” is as contingent on human whim as any algorithm.

And the famous are then figments of that record. They're no more real than Beowulf, the warrior longing for fame, who achieved nothing like the enduring fame of Beowulf, the poem. And is Kylie Jenner real? Forbes' billionaire list is renowned for its creative math—and Instagram, like faces touched by fillers, is known for artful distortions. It seems the longing for fame, then, shared by Beowulf and Jenner, doubles as the longing to sacrifice one's real life wholly to the record, to pass out of fact and into fiction.

Virginia Heffernan writing in Wired