Fame as we knew it has been obliterated

20.10.2023 - 12:37 / polygon.com / Kim Kardashian

The nature of celebrity has drastically changed. The seismic shift of the digital age means I can go into a room and bring up Hasan Piker’s name to a group of people. Half will know who he is and their eyes will light up. The other half will falter and look clueless.

As social media followings have ballooned, there are tons of streamers, YouTubers, and TikTokers with sizable followings that you haven’t heard of or that mainstream media isn’t covering. Fame has become fragmented.

Gone are the days of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, where everyone knew their names. They commanded global attention and their fame was of a different caliber.

I couldn’t, in this day and age, write a fictionalized book about a significant Twitch streamer like Piker and just title it “Brunette,” as Joyce Carol Oates did with Marilyn Monroe and Blonde. Marilyn Monroe was a singular icon, a tour de force that inspired Oates’ 738-page tome and many biopics. Today, books written by and about streamers have come and gone, and they feel like drops in a very large bucket.

This complete fragmentation of fame has resulted in a dramatic transformation in how we regard celebrities. When Kim Kardashian emerged to fame on the heels of Paris Hilton, the media used to decry how she was famous for no reason. Today, she’s a billionaire with more than 364 million Instagram followers, but one thing that hasn’t changed is people’s regard for her legitimacy. If you search up her efforts to pass the California bar exam, tons of strangers online are critiquing her approach to law and questioning her credibility.

“If you look back to the 1950s and ’60s, in particular mass entertainment and mass media consumption, it was highly centralized,” says University of Oregon media and game studies professor Maxwell Foxman. “So as a consequence, to be a celebrity meant traversing a really complicated path. But once you got to that top echelon where you were appearing on television, you were appearing on radio, you were the only game in town, and that really spoke to what created mass appeal.”

Kim Kardashian’s climb to fame was once viewed as unusual. But in today’s climate, it’s commonplace.

“Especially with TikTok and how easily people are able to blow up overnight, fame has become something that many can achieve, but holding that over time can be difficult,” says Jayden Diaz, a Twitch streamer who has amassed more than 400,000 followers.

“If I go to TwitchCon, I can’t go 25 feet without someone stopping me for a picture, an autograph, etc. If I go out in the world, I’ll go months without being noticed a single time,” says Twitch streamer Ben “Cohh Carnage” Cassell. “The fact that fame is now something that people seek out instead of being exposed to