Fame

I wonder if fame has become a new social divide over and above class. With the rise of all forms of entertainment and the much hyped creative classes, the measure of a person's standing is increasingly less about money, I'd argue, and more about fame - the process of becoming known. Fame crosses over into business and leadership hagiographies, but the divide is clearest in the creative industries. In a media-heavy, digital world, seas of data are available for consumption - but how do you choose to allocate your time? Who do you choose to listen to, see, partake of? Fame is crucial, selecting in favour of those already known and making it harder for the unknown to become known.

Ben of Melbs.org pointed me in the direction of a Harpers magazine article by Bill Wasik, in which Wasik unmasks himself as the creator of the flash mob phenomenon. One thing that Ben was struck by was this sentence:

The hipsters make no pretense to divisions on principle, to forming intellectual or artistic camps; at any given moment, it is the same books, records, films that are judged au courant by all, leading to the curious spectacle of an “alternative” culture more unanimous than the mainstream it ostensibly opposes. What critical impulse does exist among their number merely causes a favorite to be more readily abandoned, as abandoned—whether Friendster.com, Franz Ferdinand, or Jonathan Safran Foer—it inevitably will be. Once abandoned, it is never taken up again.

So hipsters, who pride themselves of being well ahead of the pack in unearthing the latest outcropping of cool, are in fact led to become the herd they'd no doubt scorn. I think Wasik is suggesting that the notion of fame has become self-sustaining, with little reference to former criteria of worth; that fame, being known, has become the most arbitary of divisions based on a severely limited shelf-life, and is hence even more sought after for its unattainability.