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May 18, 2004
Famous for fifteen people
Posted by Seb Paquet
Gordon Gould sparks an interesting discussion on what success in blogging means or ought to mean. He basically says that it follows from the power law argument that people will blog for fame, not fortune, but fame of the fifteen-people variety.
For the average blogger, fame-as-success model needs to become pride in publishing on what is effectively the new refrigerator door. It needs to move away from being stack-ranked against bOING bOING and become much, much more socially localized. We need to encourage the concept of micro-fame among one’s peers, friends, and families. This is both a technical infrastructure change and a social redefinition.
A concise and well-articulated entry.
Comments (4)
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1. Seth Finkelstein on May 18, 2004 10:03 PM writes...
Umm, am I the only person less than thrilled by what's essentially saying:
"Let's face it, there's going to be a few rich people here, and everyone else. We need to tell those poor people to stop measuring themselves against the wealthy, and encourage the concept of "micro-wealth", that is, telling them to be happy if they aren't starving or homeless."
A social theorist should see the flaws here ...
Permalink to Comment2. xian on May 20, 2004 1:02 PM writes...
Ah, but does the wealth:fame analogy hold up? It might, but only if wealth and fame both lose their meaning if widely enough distributed.
Can we agree that not everyone can be famous at the same time without the word fame losing its meaning?
Then again, I'll take my 15 minutes of nanofame and like it.
Permalink to Comment3. phil jones on May 20, 2004 1:30 PM writes...
Good point Seth, fame is increasingly becoming wealth :
* http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue2_4/goldhaber/index.html
* http://www.nooranch.com/synaesmedia/wiki/wiki.cgi?NetoCracy
Permalink to Comment4. Seth Finkelstein on May 21, 2004 6:27 PM writes...
Both wealth and fame tend to follow power-law distributions, and this can be an uncomfortable fact in the face of ideology which claims accessibility and meritocracy.
They are also comparative - a poor American might be "rich" by third-world standards. But saying these are comparative begs the question, and often is a way of telling the relative have-nots to shut-up and be happy because it could always be even worse.
Note that people might be satisfied with only meager success, because basically everyone else has quit! (that is, if you're not content with only nanofame, you stop doing it, because you'll never get more - so the people who remain are the content ones)
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