Only fifteen minutes of fame? It may not be the case!
Contrary to popular belief, people who become truly famous stay famous for decades, and this is the case whatever field they are in, including sports and politics, a new study has claimed.
Researchers led by Eran Shor from McGill University's department of Sociology and Arnout van de Rijt of Stony Brook University studied all the names mentioned in over 2,000 English-language newspapers from the US, Canada and the UK over a period of several decades.
Talent, resources or chance events may propel an individual into the spotlight. But once someone becomes truly famous, they tend to stay that way, the study found.
Temporary celebrity is highly unusual and is to be found primarily in the bottom tiers of the fame hierarchy, such as when people like whistle blowers become famous for a limited time for participating in particular events.
This is even true of entertainment, where it might appear that fame is likely to be most ephemeral.
For example, in a random sample of 100,000 names appearing in the entertainment sections of newspapers during the period 2004-2009, the ten names that appeared most frequently were Jamie Foxx, Bill Murray, Natalie Portman, Tommy Lee Jones, Naomi Watts, Howard Hughes, Phil Spector, John Malkovich, Adrien Brody, and Steve Buscemi.
All have been celebrated for at least a decade and all are still much talked about today.
The finding that goes against most of the scholarly research until now.
"There is almost a consensus among scholars in the field of the sociology of fame that most fame is ephemeral," said Shor.
"What we've shown here that is truly revolutionary is that the people who you and I would consider famous, even the Kim Kardashians of this world, stay famous for a long time. It doesn't come and go," Shor said.
Indeed, the annual turnover in the group of famous names is very low. Ninety-six per cent of those whose names were mentioned over 100 times in the newspapers in a given year were already in the news at least three years before.
The authors pointed out that this can be explained by the fact that both media and audiences are trapped in a self-reinforcing equilibrium where they must continue to devote attention, airtime and newspaper space to the same old characters because everyone else does so as well.
