Page 211 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

STEPHEN HINERMAN

value judgment on such changes without fully understanding those changes in
a larger context easily leads to flawed judgments.
Ultimately, modern fame assumes importance not for what it says about the
feelings or reputations of famous people but for what it does for audiences.
Some scholars, particularly those who work from the ‘top down’ in their
critiques of modern stardom, forget that it is the audience that determines
celebrity. These critics sometimes become more seduced by the aura of stars
than the masses they fret about so much.
The impact of time and space on audiences’ relationships with famous
people has always been vital to understanding how renown is granted. We can
find examples as far back in time as classical Greece. When Aristotle in the
Rhetoric describes the qualities of people who have ethos, and are able to
engender emulation in others, he is telling us about fame:

They are the ones who possess . . . courage, wisdom, public o ffice; for
men in office can render service to many, and so can generals, orators,
and all who have the like power and influence. Emulation is excited,
too, by those who have many imitators; or whose acquaintance or
friendship many desire; or whom many admire, or whom we ourselves
admire. And it is excited by those whom poets or panegyrists celebrate
in praises and encomiums.
(Aristotle 1960: 130)

Aristotle places the onus of fame not on individual persons but on the
collective audience. It is the community which bestows fame. The only way to
understand fame, therefore, is to understand those who emulate the famous and
how they do so.
In Aristotle’s time, fame was rooted firmly in time-bound expectations of
the audience at the very moment the famous sought to transcend those tem-
poral boundaries. Fame was a set of historical valuations, an accumulation of
actions and subsequent public manifestations of praise which granted a kind of
immortality. Reputation in the ancient world, therefore, resulted from an
accretion of historical, lineal acts, viewed from a distance over time, and finally
valued and fixed by public speeches of praise or blame emanating from the
marketplace or the battlefield. Public honoring of renown was an important
aspect of classical culture, given how the famous exempli fied, personified, and
modeled ideal behavior and values. Ulf Hannerz notes that this phenomenon
still occurs in many non-media cultures: ‘small-scale, non-media societies make
sure that much meaning is effortlessly kept alive at least in microtime, through
redundancy. Knowledge and beliefs are inscribed into the environment, and
personified by individuals’ (1992: 147). These renowned individuals mark the
‘ideal life’ of the community.
Aristotle also implied that classical fame depended not only on accumulated
time but on geographically discrete space. The ‘technologies’ for spreading

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