cureforbedbugs:

I think this is a claim worth hanging on to in an age in which celebrity can indeed be largely accidental (or at least hyper-accelerated). When Lana Del Rey says it, the immediate impulse a lot of people seem to have is to scoff at the audacity of it. How can someone who has been courted by a major record label, who re-made her image specifically to try again after her first try didn’t make much of an impact, claim she didn’t “sign up” to be famous? How could you do any more to “sign up”?

Well, it depends on how you look at fame. Fame has historically been noted for the nature of its trajectory; in the 1960s the popularization of an often-tossed-around tautologies of fame (“it’s famous because it’s famous”) makes what I think is the wrong move now that may have seemed like the right move then: One could argue that this kind of swirl of fame is highly intentional and contrived. But one could also argue that this kind of swirl is the result of how networks operate — theory that has at its heart the crucial concept of randomness.

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I think you’re making a mistake here. The crucial concept isn’t randomness. But I’ll build this up a little more slowly. First, all fame is viral, whether it’s Britney, Beethoven, Einstein, or Rebecca Black. The same is true of power, wealth, and so on, as well as, literally, contagion. Even when the contagion is, literally, bacterial, it’s, figuratively, viral, which is to say that the statistical principles used to understand the spread of viruses can also be used to understand the spread of bacterial disease, the accumulation of wealth, the spread of fame, etc. The principle is called “cumulative advantage,” and, assuming it’s right, it would have applied to humans 32,000 years ago as much as it applies to people who use the Internet and mobile phones today. The modern technology connects more people, so makes networks larger, and faster, but the networks aren’t different in kind from whatever social networks the cave people possessed. (I assume you know all this, Dave, I’m just being thorough in case someone else stumbles upon this post.)

Where you’re going wrong is to assume that because randomness plays a role, the outcome draws on a greater range of types of people than it had in the past. Again, building up slow: Fame is inevitably and ineradicably unpredictable in one particular sense, which is that if you start with a group of people all more or less equal in appeal, ambition, money, and so forth, a few will become famous and most won’t, and you won’t be able to predict in advance who will and who won’t. This is because the way cumulative advantage works is that small differences get magnified. Here is where randomness comes in. If seven people talk up one song and three people talk up another, that’s not a statistically meaningful difference, just the luck of who with which taste happened to hear which song before a lot of other people did. But, say you’re participating in a readers’ poll and can see other people’s responses, the responses collated into bar graphs, and you’re seeing a tall bar representing seven, and another tall bar representing eight, and a whole bunch of puny bars down around zero through three. Now, you’ve only heard a few of the songs and know you don’t have time to listen to them all, but you think you ought to listen to a few more, especially the ones other people are voting for. So you’re going to listen to the songs with seven and eight votes, while passing over the zeros, ones, twos, and threes. And if you happen to like the one with seven votes enough to vote for it, well now it has eight votes. From this example you can see how the effect will multiply when the next voter comes along, and the one after that, and so on, all based on what’s essentially statistical noise. So a song that doesn’t have that much overall appeal can nonetheless do well if it has an initial bump, since almost all the voters it would appeal to will hear it. Whereas something with a lot of potential overall appeal may do poorly just because it started slow and few listened. But also, something without appeal to a lot of people will have its goose cooked if it starts slow, and something with a lot of appeal that starts strong will probably go through the roof. So, while the statistical noise that starts the initial bump is indeed random, and you therefore can never predict for sure which song in particular will become popular, you can predict that the ones with more appeal, more money behind them, a more ambitious, self-promoting performer, and so forth, will have a better chance of becoming popular than those that don’t — just as someone who buys a thousand lottery tickets has a better chance of winning than someone who only bought one. But you can’t guarantee that the first will win and the second will lose. Cumulative advantage does favor those with advantages, whether the advantages are fair or not.

The thing about Lana Del Rey, whose story I barely know (I like “Video Games” fine), is that, presumably, what you have to do in order to become well enough known to get your next gig, or maybe to have a viable small-time career, isn’t any different from what you’d do if you wanted to be the next superstar. In a small percentage of cases, great fame will be the result, even if the motive was just to get by.

But anyway, I don’t see how celebrity gets more “effectively” networked, just that networks can get larger. And I can’t comprehend what you mean by saying celebrity gets more random. “Random” would seem to be an either/or concept, like “pregnant.” As a network gets larger, the pool it draws from gets larger, so performers who were once outside the pool now have a shot. And as we get more connected we get more cosmopolitan, so as individuals we see more pools than we had in the past. Therefore we experience more newbies breaking in and we observe more pools, i.e., more fields of endeavor. So everything seems to be growing, opportunities and fields of opportunity. But also, since we as individuals are seeing more people and more pools, we are not able to notice from our individual vantage point some other things, which I believe are true (though I can’t back this up): the number of pools is most likely shrinking worldwide, and the per capita chance of becoming well-known is going down. We are seeing more people get well-known and more fields of endeavor because as individuals we’re able to see more, period. But we’re not seeing the shrinkage, and this is because we were never aware 50 years ago of the vast number of people and pools who were out of our eyesight. —And yes there are literally a couple more billion people than there were, so maybe, though I wouldn’t bet on it, more pools overall, but there are nonetheless fewer opportunities for fame, and a smaller distribution of the sort of people who can get the fame — this despite our experience seeming to tell us just the opposite, since we as individuals are seeing the famous in greater numbers and variety.

As I said, I can’t support my claims, not having done research. But thought and logic and my understanding of connection and cosmopolitanism run in my idea’s direction. Think of (a very loose) analogy: We are ever discovering more and more biological species, but even so, the number of species in the world is diminishing dangerously. Among those dying are many the biologists have never seen.