Tarde described fame as an economy of visibility measured by attentional convergence.

Evidence

But, above all, Tarde understood the way in which attentional alignment structures a whole new economy of visibility whose currency is ‘fame’, defined as ‘the simultaneity and convergence of attention and judgment on a man or event which then becomes well-known or famous’. Even if fame as such in no way dates from the industrial age, the production of ‘audiences’ by the new media of the day (daily press, telegraph, cinema) institutes an entirely new power regime rooted in a mercantile economy, from the moment that competition between these mass media is subjected to the logic of the market. This new mode of valorization demands new tools – capable of measuring the attentional flux – which simultaneously indicate and structure our daily interactions: ‘The need for a fameometer becomes even more apparent when celebrities of every kind are more abundant, more sudden and more fleeting, and when, despite their habitual impermanence, they do not fail to be accompanied by a formidable power, since they are a good for the possessor, but a light, a faith, for society.’ — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 34

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines fame as ‘simultaneity and convergence of attention and judgment’ on a person or event — a core construct for the attention economy.
• XREF: Tarde’s ‘fameometer’ as a measuring instrument for attention flux anticipates today’s engagement metrics, reach graphs, and influencer analytics.
• SEED: An article angle: Tarde’s 1890s ‘fameometer’ imagined 130 years before it — how nineteenth-century prediction of attention measurement maps onto platform metrics engineering.