Yesterday's NY Times Science section featured a report on research into fame.
As many of us have been noticing, Andy Warhol's prediction that in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes came true a lot sooner than even Andy would have believed.
YouTube, vlogs, podcasts, blogs, reality TV...you name it. We're all reaching for the brass ring of fame.
Why?
Come on...you know why.
OK, let's play a game. Imagine you get to choose the kind of life you're going to live.
Life #1 - You're an HR manager in a large corporation. The company owns lots of fashion brands. You're pretty smart, average in appearance, in your early 30s. You live in the suburbs and, like the song says, "take the 8:15 into the city." You work with people who do interesting, sometimes glamorous, things: travel, professionally shop, go to fashion events. You, in contrast, make sure forms are completed correctly. You're hoping to be promoted to director within the next couple of years.
Life #2 - You're an HR manager in a large corporation. (OK...I'll let you finish filling in the rest until I get to the next sentence.) One day, you're in a meeting and a camera crew breaks in, filming a scene for "Project Runway"; turns out one of the junior design assistants is a contestant. At one moment during the meeting, the junior designer says something silly, and you blurt our, "wow, I can't believe you'd say that in a business meeting...I don't care if you are a contestant on a reality show, you've got to get your act together." The line makes the cut ('cause the director wants to show just how real this show is) and airs the next week. You're on air for 10 seconds, but the hit of the show. The next morning, people on the train turn and look at you, some of them pointing you out to their friends. The security guards greet you with extra enthusiasm. Everybody in the office treats you differently: people who wouldn't have given you the time of day yesterday chat you up, buy your Starbucks, ask you to join them for drinks after work.
What's changed? Nothing, really. And, everything.
In Life #1, you were nobody and you remain nobody. Oh, you're somebody to the 30 or so people who you interact with regularly; but, to the rest of us, you're nobody.
In Life #2, you were nobody and you became somebody. You emerged from the sea of anonymity and now stand out. Being somebody (you know that silly query posed to the vaguely famous: "aren't you somebody?") is such a powerful yearning that we are willing, no, eager, to put ourselves in the weirdest of circumstances on the off chance that we, too, might be touched by the light, and become somebody.
As the means for attaining "somebodyhood" have become more tantalizingly available ("those damn Pokemon kids; I coulda done that!") those who stand inside the light of fame are increasingly distinct from those who do not. In times past, we could shrug off the lack of being somebody by blaming various "systems"; "well, you've gotta know somebody in Hollywood to make a music video." Not anymore.
And, you don't have to be a performer to become somebody today. Hell, geeks qualify, too.
So now, there's no excuse. Today, if you're not somebody, you're really nobody. In a world in which there are so many somebodies...new ones daily...what's wrong with anybody who isn't? So, not being somebody today is really your own fault.
Of course, all of this is about small f fame, not capital F Fame. In this world, once attained, keeping capital F Fame is doubly treacherous.
Viacom ditches Tom Cruise. Does that reduce his Fame? Of course not. But it does speak to the voracity of the Fame Beast. Is Oprah gay? Kate Moss: rehabilitated by the fashion industry. Mel Gibson.
Nonetheless, those living Life #1 seek Life #2, and those living Life #2 seek capital F Fame.
Damn, this business of becoming and being somebody gets harder every day.
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