“Everybody will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.”
So goes the popular Andy Warhol quote nicked to death by pop culture and the media and applied to every Tom, Dick and Harry; and every Carol, Jane and Mary who rises from obscurity to overnight celebrity. In this day and age of reality TV and YouTube, the phenomenon first pointed out by Warhol in 1968 continues to be relevant.
It is how we imagine the pinnacle of celebrity no matter how short lived. It is our collective idea of cool when we become collectively brainless enough for reality TV and its viewers. This is how it plays out in reality.
Get a good grip. The trip is going to be a short, fast, and furious one. Enjoy at your own peril.
- Minute 01: You may be really good at what you do but most of the time; you’re just the ordinary pedestrian crossing the street when the lights say so and who stops when the lights say don’t cross. You just happen to be there and you unwittingly do the right thing. It’s an incident you pass of as nothing much until the news guys sell it as a happy accident with a hesitant hero. You!
- Minute 02: You’ve just seen a glimpse of yourself on TV and you’re amused. Everybody else, however, gets curious and so they follow you round. They all begin to ask you things ranging from the silly to the absurd to the downright scandalous just to egg you on and keep you talking. You try to calm things down by being yourself. You begin to wonder if you’re still amused.
- Minute 03: Even your mother knows about it now and keeps telling everyone about it. Everybody’s mother begins calling you up now and to avoid being bothered; you divert all calls to voice mail.
- Minute 04: You have decided to clam up thinking all this undue attention will soon blow over. There is no let up however as the media follows everything you do. They track you down with some drone-borne homing device they call “broadcast journalism and real-time interaction” online you don’t really know much about. Until someone accesses them for you and you see your face plastered online as a Facebook profile pic. Someone’s been clever enough to put up your first fan club!
- Minute 05: Having coffee down Starbucks on a break, somebody walks up to you and says: “You’re not real! This is all hype and you know it! Cut it out!” This arrogant stranger takes you aback. Everybody else around stares back at you, dumbfounded. You stare back at each and everyone around just as dumbstruck. You leave quickly. Dazed and confused.
- Minute 06: You can’t sleep it off. The incident at the café is just too weird for you. It is stressing you out and you get even more stressed out with serious sleep deprivation.
- Minute 07: Rest is all you need, you tell yourself. You go get some grocery shopping done and as you turn in the cartload, people recognize you. The guy-on-TV you. Please, people. Leave me alone, you plead. I am not what you make me up to be. The crowd can’t be held back. You blow your top. Things fly. You flee as everybody else stops dead on their tracks shocked by your explosive reaction.
- Minute 08: On TV, you watch a CCTV replay of what happened and you can’t recognize you. Even your mother can’t. The news guy says it a different way by asking: Have we created this monster?
- Minute 09: The Facebook guys who put the page up for you do all they can to explain your side even without bothering to ask you personally. You call them up to say don’t bother and it’s only making things worse. Your fan club feels betrayed. They turn on you and shut you down.
- Minute 10: You tell the TV news guys the same thing. It’s the biggest effing off you’ve ever done. What you know about Warhol’s 15 minutes isn’t true. It’s much shorter than that. So you flip the finger on the big unknown, and believe it or not, you feel much better now crossing the street. Life is too short to bother about 15 minutes.
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