Fame!

Oscar Wilde once resolved, “Somehow or other I’ll be famous, and if I’m not famous, I’ll be notorious.” This is not as easy as it sounds. Oscar could make one flippant remark about his blue china and find himself catapulted onto the national scene. I make a lot of flippant remarks about a variety of things, and I can’t even get onto GossipGeek.

Like a fairly significant number of other Harvard students, I have succumbed to the siren song of the gossip blogosphere. I thrive on constant updates on campus celebrities. I check SexandtheIvy.com.I consider IvyGate a legitimate news source. I’ve even been known to visit CampusOTR. With papers unfinished and take-home exams gathering dust, I follow the every move of such luminaries as Lena Chen and “Lamont Guy” with bated breath. But why are they so fascinating?

At Harvard, where students tend to respond to real-world celebrities with the vague sense that they could do a better job themselves, the recipe for celebrity is complex. And in spite of GossipGeek’s arbitrary dictums on whose blurry cellphone photos and dubious dining hall sightings are newsworthy, some people retain more celebrity status than others. So what do they have that I don’t?

I would say marketable skills, but this is Harvard, where everyone’s roommate is secretly a world-class violinist. Besides, celebrity entails something else besides excellence. Professor Steven Pinker may be eminent in his field, but he would be just another distinguished professor without his distinctive hairstyle.

Perhaps organizational involvement is the key. One relatively reliable indicator of someone’s celebrity status is the number of e-mail lists he appears on. On this count, again, I fail. The closest I ever came to celebrity-esque domination of the e-mail sphere was when I inadvertently stayed on the Speech and Debate mailing list all last year because I couldn’t figure out how to remove myself.

What about Facebook? According to a study conducted at Penn State, people with higher friend counts seem cooler, more attractive, and more confident. Given the bizarrely circular nature of celebrity, in which you can become known simply by being known, Facebook seems like an ideal tool. In a culture where “friend” has become a verb, the acquisition of another recognizable acquaintance translates to enhanced social capital. Or does it? The Penn State study found that, once someone had more than 800 friends, people started deeming him insecure. It’s unclear how 800 became the cutoff, but there it is.

Maybe it’s not the number of friends that counts, but how much those friends want to marry, spend days shopping with, or be handcuffed to you. Fortunately, there’s a Facebook application—Compare People—that can tell you these things. I receive dispiriting emails from Compare People once a week, telling me about my most powerful peers, or my most attractive qualities, or people it has found who are similar to me. These people seem to have nothing in common other than being poorly ranked in terms of “smells good.” Supposedly, the only way to improve my standing is to invite more people. But just asking for more comparisons will do little to alter people’s opinions.

This is the biggest obstacle to becoming a Harvard celebrity. I can take photos, send them to GossipGeek, maybe even make the front page. But this self-promotion will accomplish nothing unless people find me interesting. And with our skeptical attitude towards celebrities at large, Harvardians tend to look dubiously at anyone with aspirations to the status of “big man on campus.” Indeed, other than a few “actual” celebrities like Natalie Portman, the occasional figure skater, and the offspring of oil barons, Harvard celebrities are an eclectic lot, tangibly unified by little other than their high friend counts, full inboxes, and a few blurry cell-phone images. But somehow they all have achieved the supreme feat of making others interested in their lives.

At Harvard, the navel-gazing capital of the Northeast, this requires real ingenuity. Those who might be noticed elsewhere—mathematical geniuses, talented musicians, beautiful people—are either so prevalent they generate little enthusiasm, or so rare that people have forgotten what they look like. Besides, these qualities are ones that many Harvard students have had ascribed to them (accurately or not) since infancy, and stars in these domains often leave them unfazed. This is why there is something quirky about Harvard’s celebrities. In a sea of excellence, those who manage to be famous must also be, in a way, notorious. Whether by appearing on reality television, writing a sex blog, or just being extra abstinent, these celebrities set themselves apart from the common run of overachievers by doing something no one else can. And until I can coax out some talent of my own—I do play the accordion—I’ll just have to live vicariously through them.

Alexandra A. Petri ’10 is a classics and English and American literature and languages concentrator in Eliot House. Her column appears regularly.