Contemporary scholarship has conceptualized modern fame as an open system in which people continually move in and out of celebrity status. This model stands in stark contrast to the traditional notion in the sociology of stratification that depicts stable hierarchies sustained through classic forces such as social structure and cumulative advantage. We investigate the mobility of fame using a unique data source containing daily records of references to person names in a large corpus of English-language media sources. These data reveal that only at the bottom of the public attention hierarchy do names exhibit fast turnover; at upper tiers, stable coverage persists around a fixed level and rank for decades. Fame exhibits strong continuity even in entertainment, on television, and on blogs, where it has been thought to be most ephemeral. We conclude that once a person’s name is decoupled from the initial event that lent it momentary attention, self-reinforcing processes, career structures, and commemorative practices perpetuate fame.
AlberoniFrancesco. 1972. “The Powerless Elite: Theory and Sociological Research on the Phenomenon of the Stars.” Pp. 75–98 in Sociology of Mass Communications: Selected Readings, edited by McQuailD.. Middlesex, UK: Penguin Books.
2.
AllenMichael P.LincolnAnne E.. 2004. “The Cultural Consecration of American Films.” Social Forces82:871–94.
3.
AllenMichael P.ParsonsNicholas L.. 2006. “The Institutionalization of Fame: Achievement, Recognition, and Cultural Consecration in Baseball.” American Sociological Review71:808–825.
4.
AllisonPaul D.1980. “Inequality and Scientific Productivity.” Social Studies of Science10:163–79.
5.
AllisonPaul D.LongJ. ScottKrauzeTed K.. 1982. “Cumulative Advantage and Inequality in Science.” American Sociological Review47:615–25.
6.
AlwoodEdward. 1996. Straight News: Gays, Lesbians and the News Media. New York: Columbia University Press.
7.
AndrewsKenneth T.CarenNeal. 2010. “Making the News: Movement Organizations, Media Attention, and the Public Agenda.” American Sociological Review75:841–66.
8.
BarabásiAlbert-LászlóAlbertRéka. 1999. “Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks.” Science286:509–512.
9.
BassFrank. 1969. “A New Product Growth Model for Consumer Durables.” Management Science15:215–27.
10.
BautinMikhailWardCharlesPatilAkshaySkienaSteven. 2010. “Access: News and Blog Analysis for the Social Sciences.” Presented at the 19th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2010), Raleigh, NC.
11.
BeckerHoward S.1982. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press.
12.
BellChristopher E.2007. American Idolatry: Celebrity, Commodity, and Reality Television. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishers & Co.
13.
BergerJonahMensGaël Le. 2009. “How Adoption Speed Affects the Abandonment of Cultural Tastes.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences106:8146–50.
14.
BielbyWilliam T.BielbyDenise D.. 1994. “‘All Hits Are Flukes’: Institutionalized Decision Making and the Rhetoric of Network Prime-Time Program Development.” American Journal of Sociology99:1287–1313.
15.
BielbyWilliam T.HauserRobertFeathermanDavid. 1997. “Response Errors of Black and Non-Black Males in Models of the Intergenerational Transmission of Socioeconomic Status.” American Journal of Sociology82:1242–88.
16.
BikhchandaniSushilHirshleiferDavidWelchIvo. 1992. “A Theory of Fads, Fashion, Custom, and Cultural Change as Informational Cascades.” Journal of Political Economy100:992–1026.
17.
BlackSandra E.DevereuxPaul J.. 2010. “Recent Developments in Intergenerational Mobility.” Working Paper No. 15889, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA.
18.
BondDougBondJoeOhChurlJenkinsCraigTaylorCharles L.. 2003. “Integrated Data for Events Analysis (IDEA).” Journal of Peace Research40:733–45.
19.
BoorstinDaniel. 1961. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York: Harper and Row.
20.
BothnerMatthewHaynesRichardLeeWonjaeSmithEdward N.. 2010. “When Do Matthew Effects Occur?”Journal of Mathematical Sociology34:80–114.
21.
BourdieuPierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
22.
BradenLaura E.2009. “From the Armory to Academia: Careers and Reputations of Early Modern Artists in the United States.” Poetics37:439–55.
23.
BrahamPeter. 1982. “How the Media Report Race.” Pp. 268–86 in Culture, Society, and the Media, edited by GurevitchM.BennettT.CurranJ.WoollacottJ.. London: Methuem.
24.
BraudyLeo. 1986. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
25.
ClausetAaronShaliziCosma R.NewmanMark E. J.. 2009. “Power-Law Distributions in Empirical Data.” SIAM Review51:661–703.
26.
CollinsRandall. 1998. The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change. Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard University Press.
27.
CollinsSue. 2008. “Making the Most out of 15 Minutes: Reality TV’s Dispensable Celebrity.” Television and New Media9:87–110.
28.
CowenTyler. 2000. What Price Fame?Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
29.
CraigAilsaDuboisSébastien. 2010. “Between Art and Money: The Social Space of Public Readings in Contemporary Poetry Economies and Careers.” Poetics38:441–60.
30.
Currid-HalkettElizabeth. 2010. Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity. New York: Faber & Faber.
31.
DiMaggioPaul J.1982. “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America.” Media, Culture, and Society4:33–50.
32.
DiMaggioPaul J.PowellWalter W.. 1983. “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields.” American Sociological Review48:147–60.
33.
DiPreteThomas A.2002. “Life Course Risk, Mobility Regime, and Mobility Consequences: A Comparison of Sweden, Germany, and the United States.” American Journal of Sociology108:267–309.
34.
DiPreteThomas A.EirichGreg M.. 2007. “Cumulative Advantage as a Mechanism for Inequality: A Review of Theoretical and Empirical Developments.” Annual Review of Sociology32:271–97.
35.
DowdTimothy J.LiddleKathleenLupoKimBordenAnne. 2002. “Organizing the Musical Canon: The Repertoires of Major U.S. Symphony Orchestras, 1842 to 1969.” Poetics30:35–61.
36.
EarlJenniferMartinAndrewMcCarthyJohn D.SouleSarah A.. 2004. “The Use of Newspaper Data in the Study of Collective Action.” Annual Review of Sociology30:65–80.
37.
EntineJon. 2000. Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk about It. New York: Public Affairs.
38.
EntmanRobert M.1990. “Modern Racism and the Images of Blacks in Local Television News.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication7:332–45.
39.
EricksonBonnie H.NosanchukT. A.. 1984. “The Allocation of Esteem and Disesteem: A Test of Goode’s Theory.” American Sociological Review49:648–58.
40.
FerrisKerry O.2007. “The Sociology of Celebrity.” Sociology Compass1:371–84.
41.
FerrisKerry O.2010. “The Next Big Thing: Local Celebrity.” Society47:392–95.
42.
FineGary Allen. 1996. “Reputational Entrepreneurs and the Memory of Incompetence.” American Journal of Sociology101:1159–93.
43.
FishmanMark. 1980. Manufacturing the News. Austin: University of Texas Press.
44.
FrankRobert H.CookPhilip J.. 1995. The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us. New York: Penguin Books.
45.
GablerNeal. 1999. Life The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
46.
GamsonJoshua. 1994. Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America. Berkeley: University of California Press.
47.
GamsonJoshua. 2011. “The Unwatched Life Is Not Worth Living: The Elevation of the Ordinary in Celebrity Culture.” Proceedings of the Modern Language Association126:1061–69.
48.
GamsonWilliam A.WolfsfeldGadi. 1993. “Movements and Media as Interacting Systems.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science528:114–25.
49.
GansHerbert J.1972. “The Famine in American Mass-Communications Research: Comments on Hirsch, Tuchman, and Gecas.” American Journal of Sociology77:697–705.
50.
GansHerbert J.1980. Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek and Time. New York: Vintage.
51.
GansHerbert J.1983. “News Media, News Policy, and Democracy: Research for the Future.” Journal of Communication33:174–84.
52.
GitlinTodd. 1983. Inside Prime Time. New York: Pantheon.
53.
GitlinTodd. 1998. “The Culture of Celebrity.” Dissent45:81–83.
54.
GodboleNamrataSrinivisaiahManjunathSkienaSteven. 2007. “Large-Scale Sentiment Analysis for News and Blogs.” Presented at the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, Denver, CO.
55.
GoodeWilliam J.1978. The Celebration of Heroes: Prestige as a Social Control System. Berkeley: University of California Press.
56.
GouldRoger V.2002. “The Origins of Status Hierarchies: A Formal Theory and Empirical Test.” American Journal of Sociology107:1143–78.
57.
GraffinScott D.WadeJames B.PoracJoseph F.McNameeRobert C.. 2008. “The Impact of CEO Status Diffusion on the Economic Outcomes of Other Senior Managers.” Organization Science19:457–74.
58.
GranovetterMark S.1978. “Threshold Models of Collective Behavior.” American Journal of Sociology83:1420–43.
59.
HartmanPaulHusbandCharles. 1974. Racism and the Mass Media. London: Davis-Poynter.
60.
HedströmPeter. 1994. “Contagious Collectives: On the Spatial Diffusion of Swedish Trade Unions, 1890–1940.” American Journal of Sociology99:1157–79.
61.
HilgartnerStephenBoskCharles L.. 1988. “The Rise and Fall of Social Problems: A Public Arenas Model.” American Journal of Sociology94:53–78.
62.
HopkinsDaniel J.KingGary. 2010. “A Method of Automated Nonparametric Content Analysis for Social Science.” American Journal of Political Science54:229–47.
63.
HuberJohn C.1998. “Cumulative Advantage and Success-Breeds-Success: The Value of Time Pattern Analysis.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science49:471–76.
64.
HussainMustafa. 2000. “Islam, Media and Minorities in Denmark.” Current Sociology48:95–116.
65.
JonesJames H.HandcockMark S.. 2003. “An Assessment of Preferential Attachment as a Mechanism for Human Sexual Network Formation.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B270:1123–28.
66.
KaufmanJason. 2004. “Endogenous Explanation in the Sociology of Culture.” Annual Review of Sociology30:335–57.
67.
KielwasserAlfred P.WolfMichelle A.. 1992. “Mainstream Television, Adolescent Homosexuality and Significant Silence.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication9:350–73.
68.
KingGaryLoweWill. 2003. “An Automated Information Extraction Tool for International Conflict Data with Performance as Good as Human Coders: A Rare Events Evaluation Design.” International Organization57:617–42.
69.
KurzmanCharlesAndersonCheliseKeyClintonLeeYoun OkMoloneyMaireadSilverAlexisRynMaria W. Van. 2007. “Celebrity Status.” Sociological Theory25:347–67.
70.
LamontMichèle. 1987. “How to Become a Dominant French Philosopher: The Case of Jacques Derrida.” American Journal of Sociology93:584–622.
71.
LangGladys E.LangKurt. 1988. “Recognition and Renown: The Survival of Artistic Reputation.” American Journal of Sociology94:79–109.
72.
LarsonStephanie G.2005. Media and Minorities: The Politics of Race in News and Entertainment. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
73.
LazarsfeldPaulMertonRobert K.. 1954. “Friendship as a Social Process: A Substantive and Methodological Analysis.” Pp. 18–66 in Freedom and Control in Modern Society, edited by BergerM.AbelT.PageC. H.. New York: Van Nostrand.
74.
LeskovecJureBackstromLarsKleinbergJon. 2009. “Meme Tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle.” Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining pp. 497–506.
75.
LiebersonStanley. 2000. A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashion, and Culture Change. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
76.
LiebersonStanleyBellEleanor O.. 1992. “Children’s First Names: An Empirical Study of Social Taste.” American Journal of Sociology98:511–54.
77.
LloydLevonKechagiasDimitrosSkienaSteven. 2005. “Lydia: A System for Large-Scale News Analysis.” Lecture Notes in Computer Science3772:161–66.
78.
LynnFreda B.PodolnyJoel M.TaoLin. 2009. “A Sociological (De)Construction of the Relationship between Status and Quality.” American Journal of Sociology115:755–804.
MarwellGeraldOliverPamela. 1993. The Critical Mass in Collective Action. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
81.
McCombsMaxwell E.2004. Setting the Agenda: The Mass Media and Public Opinion. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
82.
McCombsMaxwell E.ShawDonald L.. 1972. “The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media.” Public Opinion Quarterly36:176–87.
83.
McPhersonMillerSmith-LovinLynnCookJames M.. 2001. “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks.” Annual Review of Sociology27:415–44.
84.
MertonRobert K.1968. “The Matthew Effect in Science.” Science159:56–63.
85.
MeyerDavid S.GamsonJoshua. 1995. “The Challenge of Cultural Elites: Celebrities and Social Movements.” Sociological Inquiry65:181–206.
86.
MichelJean-BaptisteShenYuan KuiAidenAviva PresserVeresAdrianGrayMatthew K.the Google Books TeamPickettJoseph P.HoibergDaleClancyDanNorvigPeterOrwantJonPinkerStevenNowakMartin A.AidenErez Lieberman. 2011. “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books.” Science331:176–82.
87.
MilnerMurray2005. “Celebrity Culture as a Status System.” The Hedgehog Review7:66–77.
88.
MilnerMurray2010. “Is Celebrity a New Kind of Status System?”Society47:379–87.
89.
MolotchHarveyLesterMarilyn. 1974. “News as Purposive Behavior: On the Strategic Use of Routine Events, Accidents, and Scandals.” American Sociological Review39:101–112.
OliverPamela E.ManeyGregory M.. 2000. “Political Processes and Local Newspaper Coverage of Protest Events: From Selection Bias to Triadic Interactions.” American Journal of Sociology106:463–505.
92.
OliverPamela E.MyersDaniel J.. 1999. “How Events Enter the Public Sphere: Conflict, Location, and Sponsorship in Local Newspaper Coverage of Public Events.” American Journal of Sociology105:38–87.
93.
PodolnyJoel M.1993. “A Status-Based Model of Market Competition.” American Journal of Sociology98:829–72.
94.
PodolnyJoel M.2001. “Networks as the Pipes and Prisms of the Market.” American Journal of Sociology107:33–60.
95.
PriceDerek de Solla. 1976. “A General Theory of Bibliometric and Other Cumulative Advantage Processes.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science27:292–306.
96.
RatkiewiczJacobFortunatoSantoFlamminiAlessandroMenczerFilippoVespignaniAlessandro. 2010. “Characterizing and Modeling the Dynamics of Online Popularity.” Physical Review Letters105:158701.
97.
RestivoMichaelvan de RijtArnout. 2012. “Experimental Study of Informal Rewards in Peer Production.” PLoS ONE7:e34358.
98.
RogersEverett. 2003. Diffusion of Innovations. New York: Free Press.
RosenSherwin. 1981. “The Economics of Superstars.” American Economic Review71:845–58.
101.
RosenSherwin. 2001. “Book Review: Tyler Cowen, What Price Fame.” Journal of Cultural Economics25:151–54.
102.
RussoVito. 1981. Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies. New York: Harper and Row.
103.
RytinaSteven. 1989. “Life Chances and the Continuity of Rank: An Alternative Interpretation of Mobility Magnitudes over the Life Cycle.” American Sociological Review54:910–28.
104.
SalganikMatthewWattsDuncanDoddsPeter. 2006. “An Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market.” Science311:854–56.
105.
SalzmanJason. 1998. Making the News: A Guide for Nonprofits and Activists. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
106.
SchmutzVaughnFaupelAlison. 2010. “Gender and Cultural Consecration in Popular Music.” Social Forces89:685–707.
107.
SchneiderJoseph. 1935. “Fame and Social Origin.” Social Forces14:354–61.
108.
ShorEranYonayYuval. 2011. “‘Play and Shut Up’: The Silencing of Palestinian Athletes in Israeli Media.” Ethnic and Racial Studies34:229–47.
109.
ShorrocksAnthony. 1978. “Income Inequality and Income Mobility.” Journal of Economic Theory19:376–93.
110.
ShrumWesley. 1991. “Critics and Publics: Cultural Mediation in Highbrow and Popular Performing Arts.” American Journal of Sociology97:347–75.
111.
SimonHerbert A.1955. “On a Class of Skew Distribution Functions.” Biometrika42:425–40.
112.
SorensonAlan T.2007. “Bestseller Lists and Product Variety.” Journal of Industrial Economics15:715–38.
113.
StrangDavidSouleSarah. 1998. “Diffusion in Organizations and Social Movements: From Hybrid Corn to Poison Pills.” Annual Review of Sociology24:265–90.
114.
TaylorGary. 1996. Cultural Selection: Why Some Achievements Survive the Test of Time. New York: Basic Books.
115.
TuchmanGaye. 1973. “Making News by Doing Work: Routinizing the Unexpected.” American Journal of Sociology79:110–131.
TurnerGraeme. 2006. “The Mass Production of Celebrity: ‘Celetoids,’ Reality TV and the ‘Demotic Turn.’” International Journal of Cultural Studies9:153–65.
118.
van DijkTeun A.1993. Elite Discourse and Racism. London: Sage.
119.
van ZoonenLiesbet. 1994. Feminist Media Studies. London: Sage.
120.
VastermanPaul L. M.2005. “Media-Hype: Self- Reinforcing News Waves, Journalistic Standards and the Construction of Social Problems.” European Journal of Communication20:508–530.
121.
WangDan J.SouleSarah A.. 2012. “Social Movement Organizational Collaboration: Networks of Learning and the Diffusion of Protest Tactics, 1960–1995.” American Journal of Sociology117:1674–1722.
122.
WeberMax. 1966. Class, Status and Power: Social Stratification in Comparative Perspective, edited by BendixR.LipsetS. M.. New York: Free Press.
123.
WuFangHubermanBernardo A.. 2007. “Novelty and Collective Attention.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences104:17599–17601.
124.
YuleGeorge U.1925. “A Mathematical Theory of Evolution, Based on the Conclusions of Dr. J. C. Willis, F.R.S.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B213:21–87.
125.
ZuckermanHarriet. 1967. “Nobel Laureates in Science: Patterns of Productivity, Collaboration and Authorship.” American Journal of Sociology32:391–403.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
