Dissonance of attention
Apropos the unstoppable rise of television, Andy Warhol once predicted that everybody will have their 15 minutes of fame now. Well, he proved to be wrong. Turns out not everybody had their share of ‘famous’ on the small screen. Not even those who owned a TV set, forget those who couldn’t afford one. Fame came only to the selected few who were either in the right place at the wrong time or in the wrong place at the right time. Cameras rolled with a purpose.
The randomness of capturing a moment, with or without a human face, on reel can be best punctuated by what happened on 9/11. A majority of what was broadcast internationally were sourced from people who were holding a camcorder when those planes gatecrashed into those buildings. So many people died that morning, technically live on television, and yet the concept of 15-minutes-of-fame didn’t apply to any. All that mattered was the horror. This aberration of an event also coincided with the era that witnessed the rise of the Internet and the decline of attention.
What followed is a change in behaviour and attitude of all those who jumped on the Web. As a result of which, fame has been redefined in an absurd manner. Worse comes to worst, it’s not even confined to 15 minutes anymore. You can be famous for 24 hours or even a week if you’re lucky. And why just you? Everybody from your dog to your neighbour’s cat to that kid who gets bullied daily to that kid who fought back have the potential to be famous. Attention may be scarce but it’s still potent. We can say that somebody doesn’t deserve attention — and by extension, fame — but the very act of saying defeats the purpose. If you don’t like something, shutting up would go a longer way in arresting the spread of your discontent.
But, no.
We’d rather succumb to our core need of paying attention to every garbage that is hurled at us. What’s worse is we don’t even care about the authenticity of the content we are sharing. In quite a lot of the viral videos, it’s evident that the characters in them are performing. It’s so scripted that it’s not funny. What’s still funny though is how we ignore the details and herd on with the crowd. Maybe we do this because we are dying to escape the grim realities of our world. A very recent example could be this clip of a girl who appears to have rehearsed her dialogue and the zoom in doesn’t really help her acting skills. That said, she’s cute and so is the public response to her.
Things get cuter when the mob curdles against jejunes who are basically making a fool out of themselves. In an ideal scenario, nobody would care about them, let alone spread their talentless crap. In an unideal scenario, where we reside, we pay attention to nonsense in such proportions that Dhinchak Pooja gets a concert in Mumbai. No matter what you think of her, she wins. The same is true for a more celebrated individual like Arundhati Roy. Labeled as a one-book wonder until not too long ago, she is up with her second book. And true to her style, she recently made some historically inaccurate statements in Pakistan (of all gracious countries) and ended up arousing extreme reactions on social media. For no good reason, she even made it to national prime-time news with the anchors forced to do the publicity for her upcoming novel. Again, she wins.
The golden rule, online and offline, is this: If you don’t approve of something, ignore it. If you’re not able to do so, then you shouldn’t blame it for hogging all the limelight either. You can’t have it both ways. One of the reasons why we are screwed up as a species is because we haven’t learnt the art of distributing attention. We grant time to those who don’t even value us while overlooking those who do. We are connected with all the amazing inventions but disparaged like never before. And to top it all, we are worried about something as silly as fame. Which brings us to the greatest doubt of our times; even if everybody had their 15 minutes of fame, will they truly enjoy it?
