Andy Warhol: Wrong
Was it better to be famous back then, or is it better to be famous now? As always, we have America's institutions of higher learning to sort these things out. From Cornell University:
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.
The short answer is: Nope. It's pretty much the same.
Andy Warhol's famous dictum, in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes, is clearly wrong. And that's the bad news. Unless you're a Kardashian.
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Comments:
Feb '12
Re: Andy Warhol: Wrong
Fame is just a flash in the pan for most.. The Kardashian's and the Paris Hilton set do flash on and off from time to time.. But time will dictate.. as Charlie Chaplin said in Limelight ( 1952) “Time is the best author. It always writes the perfect ending.”
May '11
Re: Andy Warhol: Wrong
We had fewer celebrities in 1929 because our media wasn't as big as it is today. Today we produce way more movies, music and sports than we did in 1929. Even though Joe Biden thinks we had T.V in 1929 we also didn't have that as well. We probably have a higher ratio of celebrity per average person today. You have a U Tube video that goes viral you become a celebrity. Becoming a celebrity nowadays is a heck of a lot easier than it was in 1929.
Sep '10
Re: Andy Warhol: Wrong
Someone told me once that the Kardashians can do whatever they want as long as they never insult the showrunner.