Britney vs. Uncle Miltie: no competition.
[brought to you by a Time article on kids who take a class on the art of being famous, or "famo" as they call it, like you'll get famous using a word like that, unless they pronounce it with the short a / long o, then that might sound cool...]
There's fame and there's fame. If you know any history about America and television, then you know that back in 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951 there was Milton Berle, Bob Hope, Lucille Ball, and Red Skelton.
At 8:00 on any given night, you knew exactly where 50 million Americans were and where the would be for the following 60 minutes. There will never be, and I say never given that we are never enslaved by space aliens as media-hungry as human beings who force us to watch Neptunian Idol, a time when so many people share the exact same collective popular consciousness.
You can say Madonna is famous, but if there were a way to condense her fame, to search into the memories of people and quantify the variety and depth of memory, I don't think she could compare to someone like Jack Benny. If you were in front of your television week after week, knowing, absolutely knowing, that if you missed something, it would be gone forever, you would watch and you would pay attention. Even with my television watching experience, I could never extrapolate my pop culture saturation to understand the mindset of people who shared those original live television experiences.
I remember staying in front of the TV at 4:00 in the afternoon to watch Thriller, but even then, MTV played that video repeatedly for weeks, so if I missed five minutes, I could always tune in later. And once I bought a VCR, nothing was ever shared with anyone ever again, since I could watch or not watch what I wanted whenever.
Today's famous think they've achieved the fame they witnessed as children, but each subsequent generation of seekers is wading deeper and deeper into an ocean of competition. Those early famous shared an entire country across three television networks. Now people say, "Ooh, 200,000 people have downloaded my video from youtube," but what does that mean? From my experience, it means about as much as when someone says, "What a cute puppy." I looked and yes, it was cute, but I'm not going to alter my schedule or my life to see that puppy next week. Because we all hope to be famous one day, we believe the lie that when someone watches your video that that will guarantee fame, but it can't. Not in this classic way which is presently unattainable.
People go to conventions to keep the memories alive, but should real fame require life support?
So we redefine what it is to be famous. The standard has been lowered to simple awareness. We don't even try to be famous for 15 minutes. We just want someone we've never met to say, "Yeah, I've heard of you." You want evidence of this, then tell me what happened to all the celebrity impressionists? You can only be a successful impersonator of someone else if your diluted version still contains some of the flavor of the original. But if the original isn't truly famous so that we all share that experience, then how can someone impersonate her? We share less and less every year.
Popular culture becomes diluted, so it's inevitable that fame needs to change. How many people identify that Jack Nicholson saying, "Here's Johnny" in The Shining refers to the Johnny Carson show? Probably few people under 25. That's why the term pop culture itself will also disappear. When baby boomers die off, so will much of that popular culture, which was less popular than that of the preceding generation. Sure, the numbers of people who are familiar with a particular subject are still huge, but how much we share with each other is diminishing every day.
So I'll say it again, and this time with more conviction; buy an effinglibrarian mug. Or a tee-shirt. You think I blog because I want to be a librarian for the rest of my life? Wear an effinglibrarian tee-shirt! Watch and link to my videos. This is your New Year's resolution. Make me famous, you bastards. Make me so famous that no one can think "librarian" without thinking "effing." That's your job for the coming year. Get to work.
