I have a photo in my office of the Wright Brothers historic flight where they hit the air for twelve seconds. That was all it took and they were famous. We live in an age now where millions of people look for that twelve seconds. It seems the Internet and television has put that elusive mountain top of fame and fortune in everyones grasp. We have American Idol, Survivor, Who Wants to be a Millionaire. The promise of course is that for the lucky few this will the yellow brick road to fame and fortune. For some it is, but for many it is not.
Fame is a funny thing. It is as elusive as hell. Even the fame of a stupid act has a very tight window.The woman who had all those babies will find herself alone again. Fame promises nothing. We have the ever vigilant Madonna who has managed to keep fame as a sort of sidecar to her life. At a point it doesn't matter if fame is tied to any real talent, it becomes self sustaining. But for most people there is the quick silver fame that flashes by and vanishes just as quickly as it came.
We used to think that fame was so out of reach we put it in the category of winning the lottery. But marketers figured out that Americans obsession with celebrity could be used. The internet is the latest vehicle to cash in on our obsession with becoming famous. Google is fame of a sort. If one has a lot of pages associated with your name or posts then this is cyber fame of a personal nature. Our parents could not surf the Internet in the dead of night, looking for references to their name. And what does it mean for us that we now can see these references.? Not much.
I have seen children surfing the net looking for themselves. It is harmless, but we are adults and we are doing the same thing. The great question of the internet is does it matter? If there are millions of references to millions of people does it matter that we can see our name there too? The short answer is not really. Google is encyclopedic and we we are one of the entries. Posting oneself to the top of a Google search engine is no substitute for talent. People covet fame, but they admire talent.
One might see Google fame as the final evolution of democracy. Everyone can be famous for a little bit. I could put up fifty posts signed by my Golden Retriever Bach and he would have his share of Google fame. But I would limit his time on the internet to about twelve seconds. That's enough for any dog.
William Hazelgrove is a novelist who writes from Ernest Hemingway's attic. His latest novel is Rocket Man.
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