In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. When Andy Warhol said this, he was probably referring to the news cycles of the broadcast media in the US, not the internet, which the quote has come to mean more for.
Another variation of the quote, source unknown, is “on the internet, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.” That is a particularly apt observation for social media. You see, because it is user-generated-content, we tend not to think of social media as media, even though we have come to consume it more than mainstream media. Except that here, the performers (mostly) are people we know. A person with 200 friends on Facebook has those as the audience.
But with social media giving everyone the mic, the famous-to-fifteen-people effect truly comes into its own when sub-cultures are developed and they produce stars of their own. Then, the followers are not fifteen people, literally, that the individual is known to in real life, but a subset of people too niche to be mainstream but large enough to be the in-joke of a huge number of people.
Case in point is the Malakand-based Nasir Khan Jan. Mostly Pashto content, but also makes Urdu videos. Understated, camp humour.
Efette, with tongue-in-cheek homoerotic undertones, Khanjan is someone you, reader, might not have seen but is famous enough to be parodied online in not just memes but also in videos.
His brand recognition would run in the hundred of thousands, with the total views on his videos crossing well into the millions, yet you wouldn’t have even heard of him. This is the great retribalisation by electronic media that the great. Marshal McLuhan spoke of.
Expect the same for, say Seraiki content. Or even content in only a small part of the Seraiki Waseb. Perhaps a star only in Hasilpur.
