True fame comes and doesn’t go after fifteen minutes, study

People who achieve real celebrity don’t fade away after their “fifteen minutes of fame” are over, a new study shows.

Even if they are not as famous as Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie, their names will keep turning up in newspapers and other printed media for years.

“It turns out that it’s much more than fifteen minutes of fame … If you do get famous, you’re likely to stay famous.” – Eran Shor, McGill associate professor of sociology and co-author of the study.

Shor and two colleagues from Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, N.Y. worked with a software engineer from Google and examined a random sample of 100,000 names, from a list of tens of millions of names that appeared in the entertainment sections of more than 2,000 newspapers between 2004 and 2009.

“Out of this random sample, we found out that entertainers that are not necessarily the most famous, are relatively famous still, such as Tommy Lee Jones, such as Natalie Portman, such as Canadian Bill Murray”, he said.

Famous people, such as Canadian actor Bill Murray will be in the spotlight for much, much longer than 15 minutes, a study shows. (Eric Risberg/AP Photo)

Not that easy to become famous
“If you to think that that anybody can get famous, that’s a little bit like an utopian world…Most of us will never get famous, even if we try very hard.”  – Professor Eran Shor.

The finding that true fame isn’t fleeting is surprising not only for the general public, but also for sociologists who study fame, a relatively recent field of research.

“Fame is in a sense an understudied dimension of social stratification. People aspire to fame; they aspire to political power, to wealth, to income, to education…There is a high correlation between fame and [these] other forms of social stratification”, says professor Shor.

Eran Shore, McGill associate professor of sociology and co-author of the study spoke with Gilda Salomone about fame and its enduring power.
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