Jeff Jarvis explores, in his new book, Public Parts, the dynamic I've called 'famousity', which is that amount of notoriety self-published authors in the new media are achieving by developing new kinds of intimate audiences. Famousity is the opposite of privacy. You court it and you work to get it. When you call it 'openness' or 'transparency' it takes on the veneer of a virtue, but I don't necessarily see it that way. I think the benefits of famousity are self-interested like most anything else. What you want is for people to know about you and you have to work to achieve this end.
I've been thinking about the subject of 'famousity' for a while. Famousity is that status between anonymity and fame, where as a curator of something as a subject of interest not necessarily backstopped by a meatspace institution, you become well known. I think +Jeff Jarvis makes a good enough point about the dynamic of engaging your audience honestly and proactively, but I wonder about the crossover point at which the audience becomes proactive? When does famousity work for you?
My simple example is disappearance. 'We' all know about the story of Phil Agre who had a degree of famousity in the early internet. Phil was a broadsheet internet publisher of a libertarian conspiracy rag called the Red Rock Eater News Service. One day a few years ago, Agre, a UCLA professor dropped off the grid. Unprompted, his audience amped up the search for him. He had enough famousity to prompt that spontaneous action. In that way, being public is a boon. You are not likely to disappear without being missed. But could that be said of your Facebook friends list? If you stopped posting, would people come looking for you?
Somewhere between that and being stalked by paparazzi is where we all might end up, but then what would that actually mean? I am curious about the real social currency of fame vis a vis this alternative medium. Perhaps, we are all just excited to have 'car phones' and this sort of social connectedness will become a commodity privilege in the near future, in which case actually dying of cancer with an audience of 10,000 is not significantly more interesting than dying of cancer with an audience of 50.
But today, within that margin of minor celebrity, is some coin of the realm to be useful for a wide variety of publicity ends. It is a matter of real privilige to be able to direct attention about oneself to a greater degree than one would get in the ordinary margins of professional reportage.
If I am able to generate direct sympathy, or even exemplify within myself some measure of virtue, then I can guarantee a greater benefit of the doubt should I fall into dubious circumstances. You cannot determine which archtypes or stereotypes are going to be used to describe you when you cannot speak for yourself. Having spoken for yourself in realtime gives one a different sort of credibility. One presumes, for example in reading a biography or autobiography of Dick Cheney, that various events can be colored in retrospect. The questions of who knew what and when - or what are the motivations of an individual can be much more sentimentally or sympathetically staged by those courting famousity.
Again, famousity is different than fame. Famousity is about pre-empting anonymity, privacy and obscurity. It is about putting in place a first person narrative ahead of any act or event that would result in scrutiny. It sows seeds for present and future curiosity. It is self-promotion before the fact whatever that fact may be, and it's something we must hope we can do against the prefabricated notions of what we are 'supposed' to be as citizens in a free society that actually has some fairly rigid norms.
I guess I am questioning the 'reasonable man' standard, neh? More on that next in Communicating vs Thinking.
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