The rise of a new kind of celebrity in a changing economy
Imagine Uorfi Javed showing up to an event in a dress made completely out of trash bags, or Puneet Superstar lying in complete filth and excreta in an attempt to pounce on your ever distracted attention, or the Island Boys indulging in incestuous acts. These are all parts of a larger phenomenon that we can call the online celebrity. A breed of people that can be classified as pure spectacle.
Is there something that differentiates the online celebrity – someone who finds fame exclusively through the internet, from someone who becomes famous through the traditional media of film and television?
There definitely seems to be so, the online celebrity seems to not care about the moral boundaries of ‘polite’ society and is willing to go as far as their bodies allow them, in the pursuit of fame and celebrity. They appear to be much more sensational than the average celebrity. Their fame generally seems to be marked by a kind of vapidness and an emptiness of events – there is nothing really happening in the acts that they do – Puneet Superstar is not really known for his acting or singing or his jokes – what he is known for is himself. He himself is the event.
Puneet Superstar, a notorious Indian influencer known for his outrageous stunts. A New Kind of Celebrity
Chris Rojek in his 2001 book ‘Celebrity’ distinguishes between ascribed, achieved and attributed celebrity. The ascribed celebrity is the one that derives their celebrity status from a certain lineage – take Prince William. Then there is the achieved celebrity, the most traditional form of celebrity that we know – someone who achieves all their fame through the accomplishments of the individual in open competition such as Beyonce.
However, achieved celebrity is not necessarily a matter of special talent or skill. In a lot of cases lately it is largely the result of a concentrated representation of an individual as noteworthy by the media or the masses. This is the case of the attributed celebrity. A fame that is constructed purely out of and from the media.
The reason for this new kind of celebrity is the expansion of the mass-media. Once mass media enters all of our lives 24*7 it will constantly find ways to be in our psyche day-in day out. Sensationalism is the mass media’s response to the routine and staleness of everyday life. Historian Daniel Boorstin coined the term ‘pseudo-event’ to refer to the arrangement of newsworthy events and personalities by publicists – or in today’s case – the celebrities themselves with their massive followings on social media.
Chris Rojek’s 2001 book CelebrityThey Are Not Crazy
The omnipresence of the mass media requires us to take the attributed celebrity as a significant category in contemporary culture. In light of all this, some people might think that these attributed celebrities are absolutely crazy and irrational actors.
That would be a fair assumption to make if one only looks at their acts and not the economy that they operate in. But one can make a perfectly reasonable case that Urfi and Puneet are perfectly rational actors trying to game a system whose economy runs on attention.
The Rise of The Attention Economy
Michael Goldhaber wrote an article way back in 1997 called ‘Attention Shoppers’ which became very influential in how we understand the internet today – where he argues that Economics revolves around scarcity but that information is no longer scarce online.
Goldhaber’s Article was pivotal in understanding the internet’s true economy – attention.A lot of people have called the Internet the information economy but that would be wrong simply because of the sheer abundance of information. We are drowning in information. What is scarce is attention, people only have limited time and cognitive capacity – since literally everyone can publish information, the real competition lies in getting noticed – in getting attention. He argued that it will be attention that will serve as a currency to the internet.
Goldhaber writes –
“Cyberspace affords new opportunities for capturing attention that might otherwise dissipate. It promises nearly everyone a chance at attention from millions, the potential to be noticed by the largest possible audience – or by an audience of peers whose attention we value the most. But the net also ups the ante, increasing the relentless pressure to get some fraction of this limited resource.”
In essence, Goldhaber is pointing to the paradox of the internet – that anyone can reach millions of people – but that very democracy also intensifies competition. Because attention is finite, everyone is fighting tooth and nails for it. A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. Goldhaber’s final thesis is that attention has evolved from a passive resource into an active currency.
In an economy that is slowly evolving into an economy of attention, can you really blame someone for trying to attain as much attention as possible? Figures like Urfi, Rakhi Sawant and Puneet therefore are not curiosities or accidents – they are rational actors in an emerging economic system where outrage, eccentricity, and spectacle are not just cultural phenomena but monetizable assets.
How Attention Changes into Currency
Attention is a mysterious phenomena, a process that only occurs in the mind yet somehow moves out into the world as well. No one really knows for sure what will capture people’s minds – it is hence reasonable to expect people to do everything under the sun to capture this scarce resource.
Despite its mystery, the internet has found a way to quantify or solidify attention to some degree – by recording, storing and making visible the attention users expend and receive, social media found a way around the fleeting nature of attention. Whilst unable to store flow attention internally, platforms allow attention to accumulate and store externally – in the form of followers, likes and view counts – creating a positive self- reinforcing feedback loop. This calcified attention can then be exchanged for other currencies such as money, influence and political power.
We see how changing economic foundations could be the reason as to why someone today would be so unnaturally desperate for fame and attention.
This emerging economy also marks a transformation in capitalism. A movement from the production of commodities to the representation of commodities, lifestyles and experiences. Capitalism no longer just sells objects – it sells Urfi Javed’s ridiculous new outfit, Rakhi Sawant’s outrageous comments about plastic surgery, Orry’s extravagant lifestyle, Puneet Superstar’s offensive gesture in the Bigg Boss house. It sells images of life, happiness, success, and identity, mediated through advertising, television film and celebrity. But most importantly, what it sells most today is eccentricity and sensationalism.
The Aim of The Spectacle
In the Society of The Spectacle, Guy Debord argues that our social relationships are now mediated mostly through images- which he calls the Spectacle. This entity of images desires nothing beyond itself, it exists only to perpetuate and expand – its only goal is its own continuation and expansion. In the attention economy, this finds its precise modern form: the sole aim becomes keeping users engaged, where likes, shares and views replace genuine human interaction. Or any form of substantive value.
Guy Debord’s Society of The SpectacleThe attention economy’s sole aim is engagement. It does not care why you are looking, only that you are looking – and sensation, mockery and transgression generate just as much attention as admiration and praise.
Here we find one of the biggest differentiators between achieved celebrities and attributed ones. For the attributed celebrities there is no publicity that is harmful, there is no such thing. All kinds of attention – be it frustration or disgust or admiration – all of it ultimately count as a form of attention. Take the example of Sachin Tendulkar as an example of an achieved celebrity – a man who is probably the most careful in not letting any form of ‘disreputation’ touch him. A man who probably has a team of people working day in day out to curate a carefully constructed version of him that everyone can admire.
While someone like Urfi has admitted oftentimes that she does not mind the negative attention or the trolling as long as it gets her eyeballs. Telling an interviewer in an ETimes video that she screams attention.
Uorfi Javed in an ETimes VideoWhat Does This All Mean Going Forward?
What emerges from this is a fundamental rewiring of what fame means. For Sachin Tendulkar’s generation, celebrity was downstream of achievement — the attention was a byproduct of skill, earned and carefully protected. For Urfi, Puneet, and Rakhi, the relationship is inverted: attention is not a byproduct, it is the entire product, and everything else — outfits, gestures, controversies — exists only to generate more of it.
This is not a moral failing on their part so much as an accurate reading of the economic terrain. If the currency of the new economy is attention, and if that currency does not discriminate between admiration and disgust, then the only irrational choice would be restraint. Vapidness, eccentricity, and transgression are not bugs in this system — they are its most efficient strategies, because they generate engagement faster and cheaper than talent or substance ever could.
What we are watching, then, is not a decline of culture but the emergence of a new kind of literacy — one where the attributed celebrity understands the mechanics of the attention economy more intuitively than most economists do. Urfi Javed in a trash-bag dress is not an aberration. She is, in Goldhaber’s terms, simply someone who has correctly priced her own visibility.
