Despite more time for celebrity news, duration of fame remains the same
Andy Warhol’s much-touted quip that in the future everyone will have 15 minutes of fame was surprisingly prescient, given that the year was 1968. The Internet was in its nascent stages and wouldn’t reach the masses until decades later. CNN, the original 24-hour news channel, didn’t exist. And the creators of YouTube weren’t even a twinkle in their respective parents’ eyes (members of the entrepreneurial trio were born in 1977, 1978 and 1979). But for all his foresight, Warhol got one thing wrong. According to a new study, the average duration of fame isn’t 15 minutes. It’s one week.
Researchers from Google, eBay and the University of California, Berkeley didn’t set out to study fame. They were interested in the 24-hour news cycle and its much-lamented impact on society. Among other sins, today’s frenzied onslaught of information is thought to nourish shorter and shorter attention spans. Not being old-school sociologists, the researchers didn’t gather people in a room and conduct experiments that might reveal a depth of knowledge, or lack thereof, about current events. Their laboratory, data and study participants were one: Google’s public news archive.