It all started with Ed McMahon, but Farrah Fawcett died (albeit with some advance notice)… and then Michael Jackson met his sudden end…  And then Billy Mays… and now Karl Malden has passed on.  Is our 3-count down for the count? I suspect that it, like many of our superstitions, was more a matter of perception than of actual substance.  With that said, I believe that their proximity is of note.

Two things are at work here – and both of them have to do with great thinkers from the mid-century. The first is Andy Warhol’s prescient statement that everyone has, on average, 15 minutes of fame.  While this statement has come, for many, to mean that each and every person will have 15 minutes of fame, I’ve always understood the Warholian axiom to mean that fame averages out among the population.  For example, if there were only 6 people on the planet, and all of them knew me, but they didn’t know each other, then my 100% of fame would mean 15% fame for everyone, on average.

Said differently, if there are 6 Billion people on the planet, and each of us has 15 minutes of fame, that means that there is 90,000,000,000 minutes (or 1,500,000,000 hours, or 62,500,000 days, or 171,233 years) of fame to go around.  Now take a guy like Michael Jackson, who saw roughly 36 years of fame (from 14-50).  If we use him as an average ‘superstar’ and divide his fame-life (36) into the total number of fame years available (171,233) we wind up with 4757 people who can have as many fame-years as Michael did.  Obviously, there aren’t 4757 superstars like Michael Jackson, so in order to accommodate all the fame, we need to move from superstar to D-list (and cut down the fame-years for each appropriately). If you keep sub-dividing celebrity (and expanding the definition), you’ll ultimately end up at Warhol’s conjecture that if you take all the fame-time that is possible in life and divide it across all the people on the planet, you end up with 15 minutes per person.

In 1960, the global population was estimated at 3,039,451,023, a number expected to grow to 6,848,932,929 by next year (thanks infoplease).  This doubling of our population in 2.5 generations (and still within most folks lifetimes) means that the amount of fame-time available has also been amplified, meaning more celebrity is available… This is one root cause for the increase in celebrity deaths (and one reason why it’s going to get more pronounced).

To borrow on David Cronenberg’s insights regarding Warhol, Celebrity = Disaster(death) and Disaster(death) = celebrity.  In this way, a celebrity’s death is a disaster, and the death of anyone is a disaster that makes them a celebrity – consider that the only times not-so-notable people are mentioned in the Newspaper is for their obituary.

The other cause of the death of the ‘rule of three’ can be traced back to another mid-century titan: McLuhan.  The Electric Media that McLuhan predicted, manifested by the Internet, has created more niches and more opportunities for global promotion than any other innovation in history.  From Perez Hilton to Paris Hilton, the mechanisms for production and distribution have been democratized (to paraphrase Chris Anderson), and we now have more mini-celebrities than ever.  Take for example this week’s user-generated content work of Julia Bentley & Andrew Gunadie who, with a well-produced and toungue-in-Canadian-cheek internet video became national celebrities.

The point is, when everyone has so much access to fame-time, and whenever there is so much opportunity to distribute this fame, the number of celebrities, and the number of the celebrity deaths, will naturally increase.

Warhol and McLuhan were fare more morbid and prescient than we ever considered, an underestimation that can only end in disaster…

Celebrities are our new royalty, a broad swath of Dukes and Duchesses, Earls and Ladies, Princes and Princesses, and Kings and Queens that hold their ceremonial positions at the pleasure of their popularity, and whose influence is as powerless as the opinions that swirl around them.

Perhaps first in line for the Hollywood throne are the power-couple known as Brangelina. Their love affair(s) have captured the hearts and minds of many on the planet, and when word came of Angelina’s pregnancy, followed shortly by Jack Black’s Twin slip during a junket for Kung-Fu Panda, the world held its breath for the birth of these ‘divine’ children. And when it came time to sell the rights to the photographs of the royal offspring, an as-yet-unnamed U.S. magazine paid US$11 Million for the privilege of first-run publication.

$11 Million. Let me type that again, numerically this time: $11,000,000.

Is this an egregious sum of money to pay for photographs of two people’s newborn twins? Shall we all suck in our breath, aghast at how insane that number is? Not at all.

These magazine publishing guys aren’t stupid… If someone has agreed to pay that much money for some baby pictures, you can be damned sure that they’re going to make that money back, and then some.

But what does this have to do with a blog on technoculture? A LOT. The pioneers of the early internet long held the belief that the democratizing nature of a virtually free global publishing system was going to fracture our media space so much that anyone with talent and gumption could get their stuff seen by anyone else on the planet. Gone would be the days, they thought, of mega-media empires. The studio system might buckle under its own weight as increased competition for the entertainment mindspace of consumers around the world. Music, movies, news, TV, fiction, commerce, whatever – all would face stiff competition from users all over the world.

While internet video has presented us with a few new ‘stars,’ they have by and large either been either associated with Hollywood (LonleyGirl15) or about Hollywoord (“Leave her Alone” fanboy Chris Cocker). Moreover, they have largely been popularized through traditional media channels which are, for the most part, controlled by the same folks that control Hollywood.

But with new media continuing to fragment our content consumption into smaller and smaller niches, as McLuhan suggested, how does someone expect to make back their 11 Mill? This speaks to Dr. McLuhan’s most famous quote: The medium is the massage. In other words, the same content can be reformatted many times and repurposed into the different niches from the hit-driven popular media, all the way down the long tail.

While many will marvel and gawk at the famous-from-birth twins, and talk about what this will do to Brad & Angela’s marriage, some will sneer at the disgusting consumerist nation that gives light to this sort of thing, while still others will create mocking flash videos with the photos.

No matter what point of view each individual takes, they all have one thing in common: They are all essentially still commoners taking interest in their lords, and the aristocracy knows how to play this game.

“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”

It seems that McLuhan was able to turn a rear-view mirror into a looking glass. I believe that McLuhan consciously and consistently exercised the effort that this blog aspires to: Tracing a path to the future by projecting himself forward and studying the present anthropologically.

It was the following quote that struck me arrears earlier today:

As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of ‘do it yourself.’

As one considers the concept of user-generated media, wikinomics, and, indeed, the sum of Web 2.0, it seems that even considering a time of Post-McLuhanism is premature indeed.

With that said, McLuhan himself once observed that:

“I don’t necessarily agree with everything I say.”

Link to more McLuhan quotes