The Difference Between Fame and Celebrity

Or, Why Not all Famous People are Celebrities and How Social Media is Cheating Us

[The following essay is a work in progress, trying to figure out some distinctions I have been toying with for a while. I am happy to hear your thoughts, comments, suggestions so that I can develop it]

Celebrities are not like us. They’re special, gifted, eternal, and we are ordinary, mundane, disposable. But we’ve become blind to the true meaning of celebrity; it’s been buried by swathes of social media influences, armchair activists and reality TV stars. Now all we have is a confused mishmash of famous people whose notoriety outstrips their talent, who pander to a populace that can’t distinguish between fame and celebrity.

           

There is a genre of reality TV designed especially for the already famous, like Celebs Go Dating, I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here and Strictly Come Dancing, and there are the ‘celebrity’ versions of game shows. But there’s a catch, which used to spark debate but no longer raises an eyebrow: some of the people on these shows aren’t really celebrities. They’re famous, but they’re not celebrities. If you look up ‘celebrity’ in the dictionary, it will tell you that a celebrity is a famous person, but that’s not the whole story.

Clay Shirky, professor on the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, defines fame as “an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention”. In social media terms, this means that if you’re getting more comments, replies and DMs than you can possibly respond to, then you’re famous. For Shirky, it’s a question of scale alone – it doesn’t matter who you are or what you did, you’re famous if you’re getting more attention than you can reciprocate. This is how the stars of TikTok, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube rise.

Take Celebrity Big Bother as the gold standard and it’s clear that something dramatic happened to the concept of celebrity in the 21^st century. In the early days, the show attracted big ticket stars, such as Mark Owen, Dennis Rodman, Jackie Stallone and Coolio, as well as domestic celebrities who were less well known outside of the UK or who were famous in their niche, like Les Dennis, Germaine Greer, Melinda Messenger and Ulrika Johnson. It was a big deal for the celebrities, who were getting an unprecedented form of brand exposure, but it was also a big deal for viewers because we felt we were getting an insight into the secret lives of the world’s biggest stars.

The first time it featured a reality TV star, without a hint of irony, was in 2007, when Jade Goodie appeared in series 5. At the time, there was an outcry of “she’s not a real celebrity” because she’d only become famous by appearing in Big Brother; we even moaned, “she doesn’t even have any talent”, which, we thought, was a pre-condition for being a celebrity. The fact she was up against, and seemingly compared to, the likes of Jermaine Jackson, H from Steps and Shilpa Shetty didn’t help. They were properly famous and properly talented, and poor Jade from the block just didn’t compare.

But the tide had already started turning the series before, when failed Big Brother auditionee, Chantelle Houghton, was dropped into the celebrity house with Pete Burns, Dennis Rodman and Rula Lenska, and of course Preston, who nobody had ever heard of. Her mission, set by Big Brother, was to convince the others that she was a real celebrity, which she did without much difficulty because the uber-famous just assumed she was too obscure and British to be on their radar and the minor celebrities were just gullible and desperate for more fame.

That was in 2006. The world was a different place: social media was barely embryonic and only around half of UK homes had broadband; it was a time when tabloid newspapers ruled the media and when television was confined to five terrestrial channels, unless you had Sky, which many did, but many didn’t. It was a time when celebrity meant something, but the world was reinventing the concept of celebrity anyway.

Chantelle and Jade were not celebrities, but the powers of television and the press made sure that they became famous as a result of their stints in the Big Brother house. The next series to feature a reality TV star was series 8, in 2011; by 2016, series 17 featured six reality TV stars, and by the time the show finished in 2018 there were four reality TV stars, and we’d stopped moaning that they’re not even celebrities.

Nowadays, ordinary citizens can become stars at the touch of a button. All you have to do is go viral with anything that others will latch onto and recirculate beyond your wildest dreams. This has been driven by social media, for sure, but also the technology that underpins it: smartphones and affordable laptops with integrated cameras and editing software, the digitisation of music and the lightspeed transfer of data afforded by the ubiquity of stable internet connections. The liberating thing about these technologies was that you no longer need to be discovered by an old-school A&R man in the back room of a Camden pub, nor does your dad have to be editor of the Telegraph to get a foot in the door. Technology opened the door for everyone, and social media wedged it open.

Also, the rise of reality TV, with shows like Love Island and The Only Way is Essex creating stars out of the ordinary grit of life, not to mention the likes of X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent. Andy Warhol, it seems, was right when he said in the future everyone will have 15 minutes of fame: social media, digital technology, the internet and the proliferation of content through streaming services and the expansion of television ensures that anyone, everywhere has a shot at their 15 minutes.

We now have a parade of influencers who promote brands on Instagram, armchair activists who drag people into their endless, futile Twitter debates, and beautiful people on TikTok who don’t do very much at all but look pretty. Some of them do very well, like Joe Sugg, but most don’t. They’re just like us, and they’re good at something that loads of other people are good at, but very few, if any, are stand-out talents. So, if you can become famous for having a common talent, what elevates you to the lofty status of celebrity? The answer is simple: to be a celebrity, you have to be a professional who gets famous.

Shirky says that “A profession exists to solve a hard problem, one that requires some sort of specialization”, so professionals are people with exceptional talents in things that most of us are only moderately good at. So, whilst lots of people can drive, only a few can be Formula One drivers; similarly, lots of people can sing, but not many can sing in some exceptional, spellbinding way like Elvis.

A professional in any field is someone who stands above the rest. Back in the golden age of Hollywood, there was Cary Grant, Marylyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Frank Sinatra. What they have is more than talent – we all have that to some degree – and it’s more than a special skill, which anyone can develop under the right conditions. They have ‘star quality’, as if born of fiery cosmic dust and sent to Earth. They have a gift in some specific area, something unique to them and precious to everyone else. Anyone can be famous, but it takes someone special to be a celebrity, for celebrity is the intoxicating combination of fame and a remarkable gift.

Michael Jackson’s gift for singing and dancing set him above all of his contemporaries who could sing and dance; and then there’s Barbara Streisand, Whitney Houston and Bruce Springsteen, not to mention Adele, Eminem and Robbie Williams. All of them uniquely gifted in something that the rest are just good at, and all of them speckled with stardust. Think about Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber, Harry Styles or Taylor Swift and you’ll see the difference: they’re talented and brilliant, but they don’t have that special gift, they’re not the professionals to solve the hard problem of changing pop music for ever. They’re good, but they’re not that good, not really, if you search deep in your soul.

Another distinguishing feature of a celebrity is that, as a professional, they make a deep and enduring contribution; they shift perspectives, disrupt the standard, rewrite the rule book and influence others to do things their way; without them, the cultural landscape would be different, or even worse off. Sure, someone might do pop music differently as a result of the influence of Justin Bieber or Taylor Swift, but most won’t, unlike Elvis or Michael Jackson, who changed the way anyone approaches pop by providing the gold standard that everyone else must live up to.

Anyone can be famous, but it takes a professional with a gift to be a celebrity, even in the social media age. The price of the enthralling equality of opportunity that social media offers is the death of true celebrity and with it the vanishing of the gilded allure and fantastical otherness of the professional.