The quantitative measure and statistical distribution of fame

Fame and celebrity play an ever-increasing role in our culture. However, despite the cultural and economic importance of fame and its gradations, there exists no consensus method for quantifying the fame of an individual, or of comparing that of two individuals. We argue that, even if fame is diffic...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2018-07, Vol.13 (7), p.e0200196-e0200196
Main Authors: Ramirez, Edward D, Hagen, Stephen J
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
Celebrities
Clustering
Computer and Information Sciences
Crashes
Deaths
Digitization
Economic importance
Endorsement advertising
Fame
Frequency distribution
Internet
Judgments
Landslides
People and Places
Physical Sciences
Political campaigns
Population
Research and Analysis Methods
Researchers
Social media
Social networks
Social psychology
Social Sciences
Statistical physics
Statistics
Studies
Success
Technology application
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Summary:Fame and celebrity play an ever-increasing role in our culture. However, despite the cultural and economic importance of fame and its gradations, there exists no consensus method for quantifying the fame of an individual, or of comparing that of two individuals. We argue that, even if fame is difficult to measure with precision, one may develop useful metrics for fame that correlate well with intuition and that remain reasonably stable over time. Using datasets of recently deceased individuals who were highly renowned, we have evaluated several internet-based methods for quantifying fame. We find that some widely-used internet-derived metrics, such as search engine results, correlate poorly with human subject judgments of fame. However other metrics exist that agree well with human judgments and appear to offer workable, easily accessible measures of fame. Using such a metric we perform a preliminary investigation of the statistical distribution of fame, which has some of the power law character seen in other natural and social phenomena such as landslides and market crashes. In order to demonstrate how such findings can generate quantitative insight into celebrity culture, we assess some folk ideas regarding the frequency distribution and apparent clustering of celebrity deaths.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0200196