Carlyle

Carlyle

“There’s a tendency among journalists to regard the work that puts you in the public eye for the first time as your best work,” he said in “A Life in Words.”

Erasmus Darwin’s popularity in America was so great that over a hundred children in Massachusetts between 1800 and 1850 were apparently named after him. I was so surprised to discover a half dozen of them in the remote hill-town of Ashfield where I had gone to find Dr. Charles Knowlton that I did a whole project trying to track them down.

during the first decades of the 19th century, Alexander von Humboldt was the second-most famous person in the world after Napoleon.

a montage of his many cameo appearances in TV and film (what Waters calls “fame maintenance”) capture his status as icon

Holden embraced the choice that had been made for him; his companion clearly hasn’t. She’s since taken her Instagram offline after receiving some harassing comments, at least one of which was related to Blair’s speculation about what happened when the pair simultaneously got up to use the restroom (and Holden’s cheeky comment that “a gentleman never tells” when asked about it). Of course, the sexual implication is something he’d be praised for, while the woman is attacked.

with established worldwide fame and prestige, to step in his previous successes to write more-of-the-same books and convert all the attention in cheap money. Just like Robert Kiyosaki did with his 942357 books about “Rich dad”.

Ernest Hemingway was one of the most recognized and influentialnovelists of the twentieth century. He wrote in an economical,understated style that profoundly influenced a generation of writersand led to his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

Some of his happiest moments, he said, were when he worked on political campaigns: “You think you are going to make a difference that’s going to be better for the country, and especially for widows and orphans and people who don’t even know your name and never will know your name. Boy, that’s probably as good as it gets.”

“It’s not that everybody’s famous for 15 minutes,” Tamar Gendler, the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at Yale, told me. “It’s that everybody gets damned for 15 seconds.”

Once it becomes clear that attention and praise can be garnered from organizing an attack on someone’s reputation, plenty of people discover that they have an interest in doing so.

This new ability of individuals to make a living directly from their audiences isn’t just transforming journalism. It’s also been the case for adult performers on OnlyFans, musicians on Patreon, B-list celebrities on Cameo. In Hollywood, too, power has migrated toward talent, whether it’s marquee showrunners or actors. This power shift is a major headache for big institutions, from The New York Times to record labels. And Silicon Valley investors, eager to disrupt and angry at their portrayal in big media, have been gleefully backing it. Substack embodies this cultural shift, but it’s riding the wave, not creating it.

It’s the same old story – if you spend a lot of time trying to become famous, then you become famous, but you won’t have spent any time doing anything worth being famous for.

Institutions, publics, and some media elites are encouraging academics to be more visible in the public sphere.

But, whereas engaged scholarship has a political imperative, academic microcelebrity has a market imperative. Academic microcelebrity is ostentatiously apolitical, albeit falsely so because markets are always political. Academic microcelebrity encourages brand building as opposed to consciousness-raising; brand awareness as opposed to co-creation of knowledge. It creates perverse incentives for impact as opposed to valuing social change. Microcelebrity is the economics of attention in which academics are being encouraged, mostly through normative pressure, to brand their academic knowledge for mass consumption. However, the risks and rewards of presenting oneself “to others over the Web using tools typically associated with celebrity promotion” (Barone 2009) are not the same for all academics in the neo-liberal “public” square of private media.

If you look long enough you can find my early terrible writing. You can find blog posts in which I am an idiot. I’ve had a lot of uninformed and passionate opinions on geopolitical issues from Ireland to Israel. You can find tweets I thought were witty, but think are stupid now. You can find opinions I still hold that you disagree with. I’m going to leave most of that stuff up. In doing so, I’m telling you that you have to look for context if you are seeking to understand me. You don’t have to try, I’m not particularly important, but I am complicated. When I die, I’m going to instruct my executors to burn nothing. Leave the crap there, because it’s part of my journey, and that journey has a value. People who came from where I did, and who were given the thoughts I was given, should know that the future can be different from the past.

A friend of mine asked if I’d thought through the contradiction of criticizing Blair publicly like this, when she’s another not-quite public figure too.

To summarize his argument, the media industry wants to broaden our definition of the public so that it will be fair game for discussion and content creation, meaning they can create more articles and videos, meaning they can sell more ads. The tech industry wants everything to be public because coding for privacy is difficult, and because our data, if public, is something they can sell. Our policy makers have failed to define what’s public in this digital age because, well, they don’t understand it and wouldn’t know where to begin. And also, because lobbyists don’t want them to.

Even when the attention is positive, it is overwhelming and frightening. Your mind reels at the possibility of what they could find: your address, if your voting records are logged online; your cellphone number, if you accidentally included it on a form somewhere; your unflattering selfies at the beginning of your Facebook photo archive. There are hundreds of Facebook friend requests, press requests from journalists in your Instagram inbox, even people contacting your employer when they can’t reach you directly. This story you didn’t choose becomes the main story of your life. It replaces who you really are as the narrative someone else has written is tattooed onto your skin.

the woman on the plane has deleted her own Instagram account after receiving violent abuse from the army Blair created.

We actively create our public selves, every day, one social media post at a time.

I heard a rumor that she

claim the gratitude of his child so completely

One possibility is the American preoccupation with fame. Studies have found that Americans are more interested in fame than people of other nationalities are. A 2007 Pew Research survey of 18- to 25-year-olds found that about half said that getting famous was a top priority for their peers. Television shows increasingly promote fame as a value, research has found, and pop lyrics are becoming more narcissistic. A 2010 review of research studies found that modern college students display less empathy than students of the late 1970s. These studies fit a general pattern of research showing that narcissism is on the rise. Simultaneously, Lankford said, the line between being famous and infamous is blurring. Scientists looked at the covers of People magazine issues dating from 1974 to 1998, and found that cover stars were increasingly featured for bad behavior — cheating, arrests, crime — rather than good acts (though there was a slight shift toward positivity after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks), according to their 2005 report.

Now it was because poets seemed to win fame through their fine language when their thoughts were simple enough, that the language of oratorical prose at first took a poetical colour, e.g. that of Gorgias.

Fame means being respected by everybody, or having some quality that is desired by all men, or by most, or by the good, or by the wise.

Honour is the token of a man's being famous for doing good.