Page 212 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

STAR CULTURE

fame (via poets and orators) assured that renown was, ultimately, local. Pericles
may have had wide-ranging success in battle, but his glory was not simul-
taneously celebrated in Africa or Babylon. If word spread, it circulated slowly
and was confined to particular places and spaces. Moreover, the meaning of
Pericles’ work would have been interpreted through the filter of local concerns
as well. To use another example, while Alexander the Great’s fame spread
slowly throughout the Mediterranean world, it was inevitably bound by geo-
graphical space and restricted to those social classes that had access to particular
information in specific forms – persons who were privileged to have heard
songs, poems, or speeches, or were privy to military reports or gossip.
Fame in the premodern, pre-mediated world, therefore, was clearly rooted in
fixed notions of time and space which directly in fluenced the audiences’
experience. But time and space have undergone radical transformations in the
last hundred years. Individuals now experience the world, and their selves in it,
in many different ways. Notions of what fame and renown mean to individuals
have changed as well.

Time, space, and fame in modernity
and postmodernity
Anthony Giddens, David Harvey, and John B. Thompson among others have
contributed much to current understandings of time and space which have
implications for the changing nature of fame. They all agree that globalization
and postmodernity have altered basic perceptions of the self and the experience
of time and space. Giddens’s now-familiar point is that globalization creates
‘time-space distanciation’ (1990: 14). Contemporary communication tech-
nologies and economies ‘disembed’ long-established relationship patterns from
their local contexts and create new global patterns where ‘place’ takes on a new
meaning. Human relationships no longer depend upon physical geography.
This does not mean that individuals no longer talk to people who are physic-
ally near them, or that local issues no longer matter. But as numerous theorists
have stated, social interaction today no longer depends solely on geographical
proximity. As the increasing growth of on-line relationships demonstrates, for
instance, feelings of intimacy can grow between persons who are physically
absent. For Giddens, then, ‘globalization concerns the intersection of presence
and absence, the interlacing of social events and social relations “at a distance”
with local contextualities’ (1991: 21).
Harvey claims that modern economic changes and technological develop-
ments have ‘compressed’ time and space (1989: 240). Time is speeded up; space
is collapsed. People now experience simultaneous events in quick bursts, with-
out much regard for geographical constraints. For Harvey, these changes have
come from periodic reformations of capitalism. When capitalism has under-
gone any one of its periodic crises, it has generally resulted in a speeding up
of both economic and social processes. This speeding up has had major

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