15 minutes of fame shrinking in reality TV era
By Jill Serjeant
Reuters
Thursday, August 10, 2006; 10:07 AM
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - In a reality-TV-dominated, Internet-video-crazy world, just about anyone -- from cab drivers to cocktail waitresses -- can get instant fame and often lose it just as quickly.
Homemade videos are booming on the Internet and TV shows make overnight stars of so-called real people willing to eat locusts, marry virtual strangers or swap spouses before audiences of millions.
But while the windows of opportunity are widening, the shelf life of fame seems to be steadily shrinking.
"The landscape is littered with people who are in the focus of viewers one day and who we completely forget about the next," said Andy Dehnart, who runs the Realityblurred.com Web site.
Nowhere has pop artist Andy Warhol's 1968 quotation, "In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes," seemed truer than on popular Web sites like YouTube, whose slogan is "Broadcast Yourself."
More than 65,000 videos are uploaded daily to YouTube, most of them homemade clips of viewers starring in their school musicals, doing cute things with their pets or capturing family feuds.
But YouTube, which boasts 20 million unique viewers per month, has placed a 10-minute limit on most video uploads and warned even that may be a stretch.
"We know that most of our users only watch videos that are under three minutes in length," the site said in a posting.
WARHOL'S 15 MINUTES SHRINKING?
The Andy Warhol Museum started a 15 Minutes Hall of Fame Web site in 2000, inspired by the early craze for reality shows like "Big Brother" and "Survivor."
"We thought Andy would approve. He would absolutely love all the reality TV going on right now where anyone can be a star," said Rachel Baron-Horn, supervisor of the site.
But even there, the starburst of instant celebrity is fading more quickly. "There are so many opportunities for your 15 minutes (of fame). Is there enough time in the world? Maybe it should be just 10 minutes now," said Baron-Horn.
On the site, anyone can put up a nomination for the 15-minute hall of fame and the "winner" is chosen by number of votes about once a month. Past winners ranged from Britney Spears to infamous Iraqi prison Abu Graib.
But many nominations die a quick and obscure death.
Dehnart said few people have managed to sustain their fame for long after their reality show has ended unless they have a genuine talent, like "American Idol" winner Kelly Clarkson.
"What's a cast member on 'The Real World' going to do? Go to bars and drink and fight with people?" Dehnart said.
Joshua Gamson, author of "Claims to Fame; Celebrity in Contemporary America," said the explosion of celebrity media outlets had led to a "democratization of fame."
"There are a whole slew of people out there who are not even D-list celebrities. But they have a small audience and therefore they don't last as long," Gamson said.
Gamson says YouTube and reality TV owe part of their success to the fact that they bypass the Hollywood celebrity industry.
"YouTube is less artificial. I think there is a really strong sense that much of American celebrity culture is PR generated. That creates a market for so-called real people. People enjoy cutting through the nonsense," Gamson said.
