Entries (RSS)Fame = Existence
From today’s New York Times:
- Fame has become an existential condition: If your image isn’t reflected back at you, then how do you know you’re alive?
Reminds me a bit of this:
- We live today in a society where it is necessary to see yourself, or your likeness, in the media as confirmation of your existence. People scan the television dial, major magazines, movies, or the latest pop novel to find someone who resembles them, someone who is out there mimicking their actions and gestures in the big arena. … Lest we forget, this whole scenario is market driven, and if your image does not appear en grand across the whole media superstructure of America, it is because the marketing mechanism has not deemed your niche to be worthy of selective attention, and thus—O humiliating failure!—there is nothing out there for you to buy. Which is to say, You don’t exist, go die. … You have no identity, you are invisible. You don’t even need to be “disappeared” because you are already not there.
This was written back in 1994, so it took the New York Times just sixteen years to catch up. Though I will give them credit for distilling the idea to its purest form.
Posted by Marcel Côté on 18 Jul 2010 at 07:41 under Culture, Media, Radiant Days.
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