26 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2023
    1. 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.
  2. Oct 2023
  3. Jul 2022
    1. 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.

      Holden is praised for his comments while his seatmate is vilified. It doesn't seem right, should it be the other way around?

    1. 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”.

      Many artists fall into a creativity trap caused by fame. They spend years developing a great work, but then when it's released, the industry requires they follow it up almost immediately with something even stronger.

      Jewel is an reasonable and perhaps typical example of this phenomenon. She spent several years writing the entirety of her first album Pieces of You (1995), which had three to four solid singles. As it became popular she was rushed to release Spirit (1998), which, while it was ultimately successful, didn't measure up to the first album which had far more incubation time. She wasn't able to build up enough material over time to more easily ride her initial wave of fame. Creativity on demand can be a difficult master, particularly when one is actively touring or supporting their first work while needing to

      (Compare the number of titles she self-wrote on album one vs. album two).

      M. Night Shyamalan is in a similar space, though as a director he preferred to direct scripts that he himself had written. While he'd had several years of writing and many scripts, some were owned by other production companies/studios which forced him to start from scratch several times and both write and direct at the same time, a process which is difficult to do by oneself.

      Another example is Robert Kiyosaki who spun off several similar "Rich Dad" books after the success of his first.

      Compare this with artists who have a note taking or commonplacing practice for maintaining the velocity of their creative output: - Eminem - stacking ammo - Taylor Swift - commonplace practice

  4. Jun 2022
    1. 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.

      Forte is fairly good at contextualizing people and proving ethos for what he's about to present. Essentially saying, "these people are the smart, well-known geniuses, so let's imitate them".

      Humans are already good at imitating. Are they even better at it or more motivated if the subject of imitation is famous?

      See also his sections on Twyla Tharp and Taylor Swift...

      link to : - lone genius myth: how can there be a lone genius when the majority of human history is littered with imitation?

    1. 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.”
  5. Nov 2021
    1. “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.”

      The modern day version of Andy Warhol's, "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes."

    2. 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 is a whole new sort of "attention economy".

      This genre of problem is also one of the most common defenses given by the accused as sort of "boogeyman" meant to silence accusers. How could we better balance the ills against each of the sides in these cases to mitigate the broader harms in both directions?

  6. Apr 2021
    1. 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.

      This has always been the case, especially in Hollywood. The problem becomes that everyone thinks they can become rich and famous too. Talent shows like American Idol show us that this is rarely the case. Building a platform for oneself is not an easy thing to do, even if you've got the talent.

  7. Oct 2020
    1. Aaron, to change the famous quote, "It's not the number of characters (140 or 280), but the content of your character that define you." I far prefer reading your links, analysis, and even thought leadership here to people I've never met on twitter with thousands of followers.

    2. 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.
    1. Institutions, publics, and some media elites are encouraging academics to be more visible in the public sphere.

      I can't help but be reminded of the early professoriate in the 1400's when teachers were expected to be well known or interesting enough to have their own local following and pull in their own individual students. If they weren't the right sort of thought leaders or didn't teach the "right" subjects, they failed as teachers and were kicked out of the university. Social media in this era would have been more interesting whereas, now it barely seems to be a direct economic factor. (cross reference O. Gingerich, The Book Nobody Read)

    2. 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.

      I'm reminded here of the huge number of academics who write/wrote for The Huffington Post for their "reach" despite the fact that they were generally writing for free. Non-academics were doing the same thing, but for the branding that doing so gave them.

      In my opinion, both of these groups were cheated in that they were really building THP's brand over their own.

    1. 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.
    1. 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.

      Did this really happen? Or is the author inventing it to diffuse potential criticism as she's writing about the same story herself and only helping to propagate it?

      There's definitely a need to write about this issue, so kudos for that. Ella also deftly leaves out the name of the mystery woman, I'm sure on purpose. But she does include enough breadcrumbs to make the rest of the story discover-able so that one could jump from here to participate in the piling on. I do appreciate that it doesn't appear that she's given Blair any links in the process, which for a story like this is some subtle internet shade.

    2. 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.
    3. 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.
    4. the woman on the plane has deleted her own Instagram account after receiving violent abuse from the army Blair created.

      Feature request: the ability to make one's social media account "disappear" temporarily while a public "attack" like this is happening.

      We need a great name for this. Publicity ghosting? Fame cloaking?

    5. We actively create our public selves, every day, one social media post at a time.
  8. Dec 2019
    1. claim the gratitude of his child so completely

      Rather than entertain the negative consequences of his creation, Victor imagines creating a race that will worship him.

  9. Nov 2017
    1. 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.
  10. Oct 2013
    1. 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 or persuasion? Part of persuasion is to engage the listener.

    1. 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.

      Anyone can be famous now. Youtube, viral videos, and reality stars.

  11. Sep 2013
    1. Honour is the token of a man's being famous for doing good.

      Can one have honor and derive happiness from, without being famous for it? This sounds more like fame.