Fame and the danger of "right" answers

Reading the section on fame in Here Comes Everybody made me uneasy. Clay talks of the inevitability of fame being one way. Once someone becomes famous even social tools can't get away from the fact that one person, whether a pop star or famous blogger, can't relate to the number of people who want to relate to them.

It nagged me that something felt wrong with this until it dawned on me that it is the fame that is wrong rather than the ability to deal with it.

I get nervous when people are given or assume the status of being more right than others, which is partly what is behind fame. People tend to become famous for being thought to be better, or more right, at something; living their lives, making money, singing pop songs, being a politician. Even notoriety is in a way being seen as being better at being bad than others!

Whether it is individuals or groups, religions or utopian totalitarian regimes, thinking that you have the right answer, and are more right than everyone else, causes all sorts of problems.

Yet people want right answers. We are taught to expect there to be a right answer and that we will be all right if we just make enough effort to find it. Business assumes this and that if you just pay enough consultants and do enough spreadsheets you will get to the right answer and be OK.

But I believe the web is teaching us another way.

In our forums at the BBC people used to ask how they could search to see if the right answer to a question had been offered previously. Eventually we learned that it was more productive to ask the question again as someone else might answer of the perceived right answer may have changed over time due to differing circumstances.

Surely even science is just a current working hypothesis that changes sometimes fundamentally when someone like Einstein comes along with enough insight to shift the paradigm. We need to make decisions because we need to do things and we need to do so on the best information available to us at the time we need to make those decisions. However getting wedded to those answers or becoming famous for having come up with them is a slippery slope.

For me a moving scrum of people thinking about, debating and building on, recursive "right answers" feels like the best way to deal with the complexity of modern life.

Maybe these conversations don't work with someone famous but then maybe fame is an outmoded idea? If the ability to be more right than anyone else and more famous for having done so gets fragmented by a more distributed series of conversations is that such a bad thing?

Comments

[david cushman]

risky business when members of the same group get different rights

[Euan W Semple]

Do you mean have a different sense of what right is or have different rights as in privileges?

[Dannie Jost]

Euan, this is good. I mean, I like your thoughts on fame and would tend to keep on digging about what is right when, and who is to decide what is right. I do not think that modern life is more complex than the old days life that we did not witness, what is sure is that we are overwhelmed by all the information and the ease with which it hits us on a daily basis. What seems interesting is that each generation seems to perceive its own world as more complex than that of the previous generation.
Fame is a bit of a pagan guru belief that makes the believers choices easier... And yes, the web is teaching us something else. I like it.

[Bruce Stewart]

Euan, one thought that popped out of your post (and I agree wholeheartedly with your position!) is that fame (or notoriety) has become a measuring stick in our culture of the value of someone. Without potentially millions of candidates available, there is a preference for someone "known". This forces a "star system" into effect (much as happened with the Hollywood studios of the 1930s-1940s and with sports figures from the 1960s onward).

What is more likely to emerge, therefore, is a split: those who get the spirit of questioning and seek amongst the millions for the nuggets that matter, and those who remain in the spirit of answers, and seek the stars (if I pay millions, it must be better). While the first should, Darwinian-style, ultimately take the field from the second, never forget the power of what Gartner, in its magic quadrants, calls "ability to execute" (entrenched money and power to make up for other lacunae). It will be a long, hard transition with many steps backward to go with the moves forward.

[Harold Jarche]

In the book, "The Starfish and the Spider" is a reference to "nantans", Apache leaders who appear according to need and are allowed to lead based on mutual consent. The starfish type of organisation allows leaders to emerge. Avoiding the fame paradox requires new organisational frameworks, and the Web's flat hierarchy is one example. Being able to make new connections, such as away from the current leader, is what is possible on the Web, but not in most of our other structures.

[vanderwal]

I love this post. As one who constantly sees what is not right and looking for patterns of what gets us beyond the faulty steps we have taken, this post rings very true. The consultants with spreadsheets are bothersome much of the time as they are using models that do not apply any longer to measure things that have changed, but nobody was measuring what was broken so we can't see a measurement of what improved. The measurements needed must capture inefficiencies, but how they are inefficient is not known until much later. E-mail is a great example, as the measurements around it do not show progress, but if it is removed the whole of most organizations crumble.

When we provide good conceptual models that allow us to think through the less than optimal situations we find ourselves in today, the gaps in understanding are readily apparent and become "no duh" moments. The path to improvement becomes easier to see, but the variables and components we need to use are more complex, yet they are made of a series of many simple steps with decision points at each step.

[Rupert]

True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing! I suppose that fame seems to restrict poeple's likelihood to ask questions, or appear confused by life?

[Euan W Semple]

That certainly happens to experts in my experience.