koganbot:

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.

A great response, and a good reminder for me to be careful invoking or alluding to cumulative advantage without actually explaining it — as much for me as for readers.

I definitely go wrong here: “It may be that as celebrity is more effectively “networked” (some strange amalgam of folk and top-down mass popularity — that is, mass media “priming the pump” for popularity by controlling barriers for entry) it also becomes more profoundly random.”

This seems to be where it went wrong — for one thing, effectively is an empty word there, and I made a literal error in using the word “more,” which makes it seem like I mean “more effective” (as in “this medicine is more effective than that one”) when what I mean is something more like this: “When information is more freely available, traditional barriers for entry are replaced by new barriers of entry that make it easier for many to enter the game.” And the important follow up to that would be what Frank is saying here:

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.

So I suppose what I should be saying is not that things are “more profoundly random” but that randomness, which is inherently a part of the process of becoming successful, may have a different role to play now than it did when there were more barriers to entry. (“Trollgaze” may be a useful term in that its premise is that artists are shirking traditional barriers to entry to be heard, a strategy that has been true of most novelty music.)

When I think about a different media sphere like film or television, I usually think first and foremost of the enormous financial and institutional barriers to entry. Even relatively privileged people who make competent film work — often working within university systems who pay (in-kind) for high-end equipment (undergraduate and graduate filmmakers and some independent filmmakers, often on faculty, working with student equipment) — have almost literally zero chance of ever “cascading” in the way that (e.g.) Rebecca Black or Lana Del Rey is capable of cascading or crossing over to a larger audience. This is because amateur media in film and television are categorically different from the professional media that tends to be screened in theaters and for mass audiences in terms of its distribution — there is still a rigid and enormously expensive formal distribution system for film and television media in a way that isn’t as rigid or expensive in music.

In documentary, the trend in filmmaking has gone more and more toward niche interests — some of the most successful (in dollar, rental, and eyeball terms) documentaries of the past five years have been activist pieces that speak directly to a specific audience, through word of mouth, viewing parties, etc., and whose value is not particularly in a discussion one might have about it as an art object (this is true historically of many documentaries, but most crossover documentary successes have a lot more in common with narrative realism than they do with functional, activist filmmaking techniques). An average viewer of a Robert Greenwald film very likely is gauging its argument and content, and its ability to confirm their political beliefs, more than its aesthetics. And Greenwald is still in competition with a host of other activist filmmakers, and has participated in his own smaller version of cumulative advantage. There is no discernible difference to my eye between Outfoxed, an early Greenwald film, and scores of similar student, amateur, and journalistic work on the subject.

Anyway, I guess that’s a comment on how even when pools get smaller, cumulative advantage can be in effect. I think that my fixation on randomness is in relation to theory of celebrity that still tries to explain away cumulative advantage with post-hoc narratives — Adele is the highest-selling album of the year because of her soulfulness, a convenient myth that wishes away the first part of her career that tells the story of how it just as easily could have gone the other way (because, c. “Chasing Pavements,” it did go the other way). Ditto Lizzie versus Lana. The randomness is not necessarily different, but because its role may be more visible now (precisely because we can see the field more clearly, with more information) I think it definitively puts the nail in the coffin of a pretty widely held teleological view of fame as being meaningfully connected to “work,” “effort,” or “talent.” It isn’t to say that you don’t need to have those things to be famous, but that having those three things (among many others) merely puts you in a game whose outcomes are far more complicated than the stories we tend to tell about fame after the fact. I think that my main point, re: both LDR and Rebecca Black, is that “being in the game” is now more than ever a condition of interacting with others in communication. That means that there are more people vying for fewer slots (and that may in fact be the big story about what has changed and how it’s changed, if things have in fact changed), but it also means that the arbitrariness of a Lana Del Rey or a Rebecca Black being picked over X, Y, or Z is more transparent. What we do with this arbitrariness has to do, I think, with how we talk about our role in the fame process more than “the fame process” as some abstracted “thing” that happens outside of our participation in it. But still figuring this stuff out.