Fame

Dear Princess ‘Ishka,

Fame can seduce people and become very valuable in the life of many. People who want to be famous are often disposed to sacrifice a lot of things and put a lot of effort for the sake of their aspirations. Fame per se, however, has no specific content. Or, better, it can have any content, which is not incompatible with being famous. A famous physician can be famous because she ended up being the protagonist of a public health scandal, and not because of her talent as a medical doctor; a baker becomes famous after rescuing a child drowning or because he indeed is the best baker of the country; a housewife is elected Mayor and suddenly everyone knows her. Fame attaches to anything insofar as it is not incompatible with the possibility of being on everyone’s lips.

At the same time, fame has certain specific psychological properties: it can enhance one’s general self-confidence and it has specific neuronal and hormonal positive effects. Of course it has also its dark sides, but these are usually not the direct effect of being famous alone, but of a series of complicated factors: excessive mediatic attention, consistent loss of privacy, pressure to stay in the spotlight, and so on. Fame is also neutral with respect to praise and blame: there are very famous criminals and very famous philanthropists, scientists, who made their way to the top, as well as billionaires, who just inherited their fortune. If we consider fame alone, it is just the condition according to which a person (or anything) is vastly known for something.

What we experience in many contemporary societies, especially because of the rise of social networks, is that this conception of “bare fame” has increasingly assumed value. Independently of its content, many people strive for fame. They start killing themselves at the gym or spending all their money in travelling to enhance their Instagram feeds, they post videos on YouTube with literally any entertaining content, from jokes to “social experiments”, or they open Facebook pages of memes, with all different levels of sophistication, starting from zero.

The flourishing of these activities on social networks is often spontaneous, in the sense that new social platforms require new forms of entertainment and allow for new ways of becoming famous. It is then impossible (at least for me) to recognize a well-defined pattern concerning people valuing “bare-fame” as opposed to those, who simply have adapted to new forms of communication to vehiculate their own specific contents. And maybe, it is also impossible to truly distinguish between specific contents and media, for sometimes, the fact that, say, a talk is held on YouTube is almost as important as the content of the talk itself. In other words, being a Youtuber might be prior for someone than being the creator of a certain content.

I think it is quite plain to see that “having more views” or “incrementing one’s reactions” and so on, have often become the main purposes of certain YouTubers, Instagrammers, and various kinds of admins, independently of how they will achieve those particular objectives. Fame often means money and power, but not in the context I am focusing at present. I think that many people are ignoring the side-benefits of fame, and strive for fame alone.

This phenomenon, if acknowledged to be real, is quite puzzling, but I think it can be tracked back to a crisis of younger generations, at least in part. This crisis has definitely a “good and healthy” side: old privileges are questioned, there is a new sensitivity for climate change and environmental issues, and a suspicion about the capitalistic mantra of productivity has started being part of the lives of many. However, the “social crisis” has become for many a personal crisis, meaning to further question traditional ways of finding one’s place in a society. And perhaps, in not finding any vocation but with a strong willingness to be appreciated and to still participate to society somehow, some people started looking for consent and “thumbs up”, in the form of “bare fame”. This aspect needn’t capture the whole life of these individuals, but it still seems interesting and it comes with a particular nihilistic flavor.

I really do believe in our generation, my Princess, and this I do not gratuitously, but due to historic factors, which make our generation “privileged” in the possibility of sharing contents worldwide and coming to have an unprecedent  feeling about the complexity of the whole world. Bare fame could be a downside of who-knows-what social mechanism, but it still involves skills and effort. Putting together the good and healthy side of our crisis with such skills and efforts could really change the world. For the better.

Forever yours,

‘Miasha