I saw a news article today about a study done on celebrities through analyzing five million books.  Some interesting conclusions drawn; the study found that celebrities achieve fame earlier in life (those born in 1950 initially achieved fame, on the average, at the age of 29, compared to 43 with those born in 1800) but fame drops off faster (measured by how long it takes for mentions in books to fall from half of the peak).

One other trend not mentioned in the article is that, due to the increasing diversity of our society and the proliferation of media that serve this diversity, a lot more people are able to become famous.

What if we extrapolate these two trends?  The article I read doesn’t provide enough data points to come up with a meaningful trend line (possibly the original journal article does) but if I use my imagination I imagine the number of celebrities increasing and the amount of time decreasing.  Projecting this out far enough, and the result is that everyone is famous for 15 minutes, a la Andy Warhol.

I wrote an article last week about the increasing importance of being a celebrity in today’s economy.  If being a celebrity remains important, it is only natural that more people are going to try to achieve celebrity status, and thus more people are going to succeed, only to be pushed out of the limelight ever faster by more up-and-comers.  In this scenario, Andy Warhol’s prediction of a world in which everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes seems dead on.

So, guess what?  If you live long enough, you’re going to be famous, too!  Just don’t expect it to last…