It’s a thin line between fame and infamy

But there are various kinds of fame. There’s fame for good reasons: the heroes of yesteryear were famous at the time and have gone down in history as notable figures, as will the current ones. That’s everyone from Joan of Arc to Sir Winston Churchill, Jesse Owens to Brian Lara, Louis Pasteur to Bill Gates. They all did something useful, something for the benefit of mankind. The two sportsmen may not have been involved in saving lives or making lives easier, but they brought us enjoyment and excitement. They brought us positive role models.

The other side of the coin has its own name: infamy, and it’s like being famous for reasons no one should be proud of. The early 20th century gangster and bank robber John Dillinger, for instance, was infamous because what he was known for was bad things. Not to him, though. He is quoted as saying, “All my life I wanted to be a bank robber. Carry a gun and wear a mask, Now that it’s happened I guess I’m just about the best bank robber they ever had. And I sure am happy.”

Dillinger ended up riddled with police bullets, having been informed upon by the woman who ran the brothel where he spent his final weeks. No doubt he was happy with that, too, because you can bet your life he wasn’t doing odd jobs and helping out in the kitchen. Even if he was, they were probably paying him in something more enjoyable than dollars.

Nowadays fame is easier to achieve because, far from having to wait until a ship sails across an ocean to tell the folks back home what you have achieved, you can tell the world yourself through the internet. It’s the egotist’s dream come true. “Look what I’ve just done,” you can say on your Facebook page or Twitter. The self-promoters use social media shamelessly and a new currency has been developed in the form of retweeting or “liking” something. We’re always being invited to ‘like’ something, even if we’ve never tried it, never been there, never heard of it. And what these people regard as huge success is to ‘go viral’, i.e. have the glad tidings about their wonderful selves passed on by their contacts to their contacts’ contacts and so on ad infinitum.

It cuts both ways, though, and what people post in such media is immediately available to other people to use for nefarious purposes. I recently received a post on Facebook originated by someone I don’t know, a school teacher somewhere in the USA, demonstrating to her students how what they distribute only to close friends can end up in places they have never even thought about.

These students had apparently been boasting to her about how they use the internet to send pictures of themselves to their boyfriends and girlfriends, and, with typical youthful myopia, can’t see that it can possibly do them any harm. Most of the time it doesn’t, of course, but it only takes once for an image or a phrase to get into the wrong hands and their life could be changed, but not in a good way.

The high school sports coach who took an intimate photograph of himself doing what comes naturally and intended to send it to his girlfriend, was instantly mortified to find that he’d sent it to a member of the girls’ soccer team by accident. She may have had a momentary laugh, but quickly saw the dark side and reported it to the head teacher. Not only did the coach’s girlfriend not receive his lovingly cheeky short video, but his wife found out about it. So, cheeky and titillating became sordid and sinister in a second, and this man was famous for a short time, but, like a thief in a shop caught on CCTV, he won’t be congratulating himself for it.

What he did wasn’t, in its original context, a bad thing. It wasn’t even a stupid thing, or wouldn’t have been if it had gone according to plan, but as we all know from painful childhood experience, at the end of an enjoyable and harmless activity such as squeezing your father’s signet ring with pliers so that it fits your 10-year-old finger (I did this), there is that terrible, stomach-churning moment when it all goes horribly wrong and there is no way to undo it.

The potential for infamy somehow makes the airhead activities of Kardashian-style ‘celebrities’ seem almost legitimate. They are famous rather than infamous, except in the eyes of those of us who don’t see the point of them.