The Paradox of Reality Television Fame - Page 2

This whole angle of attempting to compare talent and fame, however, misses the real point. The two have nothing to do with each other. Talent is measurable, fame is not. This is because its not the single individual that is actually "famous." Rather, our culture has fame archetypes which single individuals merely fill. For example, who is Madonna? She's an Italian-American girl from Detroit who happens to enjoy singing and dancing. Everything about her famed persona, however, has nothing to do with her. If Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone had never been born, "Madonna," as a concept, would still exist. Arguably, whatever "Madonna" is to popular culture has existed well before this individual was born and will exist well after she has faded away — merely filled by different individuals.

Thus, fame really is just an attempt to commodify all of the archetypes we encounter in people. This is all well and good in a conceptual sense — psychologically, humans have always categorized things using sample models. Sparing you, the reader, of a lengthy Advanced Psychology of Human Interaction dissertation (which I'd be making up anyway) - let's put it simply: one cannot possibly know the ins-and-outs of every person they encounter. They need archetypes, and fame is an offshoot of this need.

The increasing popularity and scope of television over the past fifty-plus years has created an interesting predicament. Television, you see, is really a completely different animal than any other medium through which fame - and its individual archetypes of people - can be channeled. Television allows us to access these archetypes using the two senses which we use predominantly to experience, categorize, and judge others: visual and auditory. As well, television was able to package these things in quick and easy-to-digest pieces, while evolving in a nearly infinitely expansive arena. Unlike movies, plays, music, and every other media- television can be everything.

Thus, the predicament that television (or, really, the way society insists on television content being structured) creates is that it both becomes the center of our archetypes for all people and it injects idealism and exclusion into the same mix. We don't archetype certain "types" of people; certain flaws don't make good television - or, more generally, don't make good "fame."

Article Author: Christopher J Falvey

Christopher J Falvey is the author of THE VN/VO at http://www.vnvo.com

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