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 hundreds 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.
The case of Arshad Khan, the tea-stall worker, however, isn’t a case of subcultures. It is about the ephemeral fame that the internet can provide, yes, the proverbial 15 minutes, but his story has catapulted to the national mainstream, not bound geographically or ethnically.
A photographer was just walking about the itwaar bazaar in Islamabad and she took his photograph, uploaded it on her Instagram account and, five days later, it became viral, with legions of females swooning over him online. You would have seen at least one TV package on him. Not going to elaborate on that.
The virality of the picture has led to a lot of national soul searching and, I daresay, over intellectualising on the issue. Though it could be said that this very piece is guilty of the same.
I won’t get into the issues of consent of the subject of the photograph; the issue of “reverse sexism”, whatever that means; the issue of the “colonial baggage” implied by the fascination with blue eyes and light skin or even the more serious issue of the relation of the status of the Pashtun, specially the working class Pashtun, with the state at large.
Many others have elaborated on the issue; a smattering had something to say, the others just wanted to pontificate.
My interests are admittedly dumb. I am just speaking from a mediaman’s point of view. The world at large is an assembly line of news items to us in the media; I have, therefore, more practical concerns.
My issue: remember those videos that had gone viral of policemen beating up suspects and that had subsequently started being covered by the TV channels around five years ago? Well, when the first one had appeared, the public living in the boondocks — and even the major cities — was surprised that there was a demand for such content. Armed with the new, cheap camera-phones from China, they started taking these videos and sending them to the channels, resulting in a flurry of grainy videos of policemen beating up the public. The news directors of the channels then realised that if they were to cover all of them, they won’t have time to show anything else.
The coverage of police brutality stopped, not because the content stopped coming.
We’re in a similar situation with good-looking working class Pashtun males. They won’t stop coming. Their images have already started being posted, like the one you can see here of the mocha outside Quaid-e-Azam University. Would he be getting the same coverage? Would they all be getting the same coverage? Like those surprised by the fact that videos of policemen beating up people have a market, maybe people from all over KP, Baluchistan, Fata or even Gilgit-Baltistan are going to start taking photographs and flooding the airwaves. “Mardan ke Arshad Khan ke ba’ad ab dekhiye Kurram Agency ke Hassan.”
And don’t take this to be a race-obsessed issue. Forget the colonial baggage, the media problem will remain the same if it were the dark-skinned Pashtuns under the spotlight or strikingly handsome individuals from the Punjab or Sindh. The assembly line won’t stop. The media is to cover all of them? “Breaking News: Naazireen, Kasur ki aik chamrrey ke kaarkhaney mein aik aur khoobsurat naujawan paaya gaya hai! Dekhtein hain, Qayyum Haider ki ye report…”
Ending with an excerpt from EM Forster’s A Passage to India. The scene is the famous court case of the novel.
“The Court was crowded and of course very hot, and the first person Adela noticed in it was the humblest of all who were present, a person who had no bearing officially upon the trial: the man who pulled the punkah. Almost naked, and splendidly formed, he sat on a raised platform near the back….He had the strength and beauty that sometimes come to flower in Indians of low birth. When that strange race nears the dust and is condemned as untouchable, then nature remembers the physician perfection that she accomplished elsewhere, and throws out a god — not many, but one here and there, to prove to society how little its categories impress her.”
Post-script: Hope things work out well for sweet, humble Arshad Khan and he makes some money off the modelling contracts he is said to have gotten. Not exploited by getting a fraction of a fraction of what another, less attractive model would have gotten.
“Reporter: Why do think you are famous?
Arshad Khan: I don’t know.”
