The 21st Century and Empty Popularity
Reality TV, data-based editorial decisions, social media, and the principled rejection of exclusionary taste have spawned “popular” things that may not actually very popular
We generally refer to something as popular when it…
- enjoys support from a significant number of people, much more than its alternatives
- is well-known
The 1982 film E.T. was popular: People actively chose to see it over alternatives, and almost everyone had heard of it.
But there's one more important factor here: popular things...
- achieve common knowledge as being "popular"
Everyone not only knew E.T. but they knew that everyone else knew E.T. (and knew that everyone knew that they knew E.T., ad infinitum).
Of course, "popular" is not just used as an objective descriptor. It carries many positive connotations. Popularity is social proof of quality. In a crowded market, popular things must have inherent properties that make them desirable. In a democratic age, to be “popular” no longer means being "vulgar" but being “of the people” — i.e. not imposed from above by fiat but chosen by many out of their free will.
“Popular” also assumes a general positivity, in that we have a word infamy for being well-known for negative reasons. And there is also a status component to popularity. If Vanessa is a “popular girl” at school, she may be universally beloved — but just as likely, she may just belong to a small high-status clique. This is why we tend to caveat “popularity” for things embraced exclusively in low-status groups. Pepe the Frog is called “popular” only to frame the scale of its problematic existence.
"Popularity" before Mass Communication
Before we consider popularity in the present day, it’s worth considering what “popularity” looked like in pre-modern times. In smaller communities, the closet parallel was renown. Once society expanded beyond a single small tribe, not everyone could know everyone else. This created a differential where some people were more well-known than others.
In almost all cases, higher status was required to earn positive recognition. Ascribed status, from political and religious leadership or membership in aristocratic castes, gave renown to certain individuals and families. And there was always some room for achieved status: exceptional achievements in hunting, war, arts, and science provided renown to non-elite-born individuals.
Renown in this era therefore worked in three steps:
1. A claim to status
2. Widespread third-party recognition of that status
3. Common knowledge of the person’s higher-status
At this point, we can assume that there were many social benefits to renown, the most important of which was automatic esteem from individuals outside of their immediate circle.
On the flip side, there were many downsides to infamy. If an individual acted with dishonor or stupidity, this resulted in a broad withholding of status benefits or even common courtesies.
Popularity in the Age of Mass Communication
Mass communication altered the dynamics of renown through one major hack: Media appearances alone created strong common knowledge about individuals without those individuals having claims to status. Put another way: The media appearance itself became the claim to status. The former reward of human achievement was now the initiating action.
In 1962, conservative historian Daniel Boorstin criticized this state of affairs in his book The Image. To Boorstin, mass media had created the “celebrity”: “a person who is known for his well-knownness." Boorstin also complained that the public relations industry quickly seized on this power to create “pseudo-events” such as press conferences or celebrations of store openings. The very act of broadcasting was extremely powerful: it could make a non-newsworthy event into “news."
As mass media expanded throughout the 20th century, mediation continued to become an easy means to higher status. But there was still an implied hierarchy of stardom. The OJ Simpson trial provided unemployed actor Kato Kaelin with renown, but he was a star on the level of Screech from Saved by the Bell. No one would say either were "popular." That was still a term reserved for individuals who achieved broad likability with their renown.
Popularity in the 21st Century
There have been at least four major changes to renown in the 21st century that complicated the concept of popularity to the point of breaking:
1. Reality TV
Reality TV found its initial narrative tension in toying with the 20th century idea of celebrity: Prime-time programming is full of famous actors and aspiring famous actors. So what if you cast truly nobody-amateurs as nobody-amateurs?
This experiment proved that broadcasting still had the power to mint renown. Reality TV imbued its contestants with “celebrity” status, despite the fact that their initial casting was based on being nobodies. The casts of Survivor and Jersey Shore became stars. To be sure, they were never more than D-list celebrities — and maybe not considered "popular" in their own right. But the hundreds of Realty TV shows around the world further expanded the number of people who enjoyed renown with only a slight devaluation of “fame.”
2. Data-based Journalism
Mass manufacturers use their sales data to make decisions on which products to support and which to cull. For most of the 20th century, publishers could only deploy this technique in broad strokes: They knew which issues or covers sold, but had no reliable data on which individual articles were the most popular.
The internet radically altered this process by providing objective “page views” and “watch time” to every piece of content, which needed to be high to secure advertising revenue. Editors then incorporated this data into their decision-making about which articles to commission and which items to boost. Every day they understood that some articles were more "popular" than others, and these articles increased ad revenue.
In this mindset, however, popularity only required a marginal larger number of clicks. A mere 5% more response could have a story declared the “winner” of the day, and rational editors would ask for future coverage on the same topic.
The problem, however, is that there is no difference in this data between a “hate click” and a “love click.” When critics pointed to teenager Rebecca Black’s “Friday” as the worst song of all time, millions watched the video out of curiosity. Even if they agreed with this negative assessment, the video became “popular” as a result.
In a digital advertising-driven media market, popularity can be equally powered through esteem or infamy.
3. Social Media
Social media extended the reality TV dynamic by allowing anyone to make themselves into celebrities. (The original tagline of YouTube was “Broadcast Yourself.”) Despite this massive act of democratization, broadcasting still bestowed higher status. Over time, the top internet celebrities have failed to reach the A-list, but they have solid claims to popularity in their public data — subscribers, views — that can be monetized in various ways.
Social media dramatically increased the number of well-known people in society. Yet it completely broke a core aspect of popularity: it obliterated common knowledge. When Haliey Welch, the Hawk Tuah Girl, arrived in the summer of 2024, Joe Rogan called her “the most famous person on the internet” despite the fact that she was mostly unknown outside of the Zynternet.
Even with so much data at our disposal, it is difficult for the normal person to estimate the reach of famous individuals’ renown. It's equally easy to assume that niche celebrities are well known to others — and to assume a celebrity is very niche when they’re actually well-known. I would easily recognize Florian Pilz of the YouTube channel Bad Gear, but I have no confidence that my friends would. But maybe I’m wrong!
4. Poptimism
This positive perspective on popular art has been the dominant form of criticism in the 21st century. It found its moral power in extending liberal values of inclusion: We should show great respect to mass manufactured culture because it has so many fans. This poptimist ethical code helped further establish that an “amassing of widespread support” was a status-worthy achievement on its own. For example, the fact that we’re still talking about Kato Kaelin after three decades means he must be very good at what he does.
The Result: A New Kind of Empty Popularity
All of these changes in the 21st century opened the door to what I would call empty popularity, where someone has achieved renown for being popular without actually enjoying significant net-positive levels of support. This is slightly different than Boorstin's celebrity: The empty-popular star is not just well-known for being well-known, but enjoys status-enhancing popularity from the media portrayal of their popularity (that may or may not be real). And it's not that infamy has become popularity, but that we assume that we should show deference to the most infamous stars in case there are actually true fans.
A clear example is Paris Hilton. She wanted to be a Boorstin-type celebrity, but she achieved true national renown after a long list of infamous moments, most famously, the leaked sex video. There was a massive ensuing media exposure, not based on positive support of Hilton as an individual but prurient curiosity about how the scandal would play out. Then data-based journalism boosted her further. In terms of page views, Hilton was always a clear winner, which led to more articles about her over time.
By 2006, she was seen as one of the most "popular" people in the world — without any proof that more people liked her than disliked her. This is why the 2007 Guinness Book of World Records named her the Most Overrated Person. But this barb came across as old-timey and mean-spirited. With the market always moving in her direction, it was logical to believe someone out there liked her, even if they were unknown to us personally. As insurance, the best approach was to look for positive reasons she may be popular. Hey, maybe “Stars are Blind” was an all-time banger. Maybe she was an entrepreneurial genius.
There is no doubt that Paris Hilton has fans, the same way that David Hasselhoff has fans. There are real humans out in the world snapping up her low-cost perfumes and attending her DJ events. But it’s also obvious that her entire decade-spanning fame was contingent upon a 21st century hack in the system: She could be “popular” — not "infamous"! — without achieving net-positive esteem as long as she drove media traffic that served as the primary stand-in for her popularity. The media propped her up in bad faith to generate revenue, yet this exposure was taken in good faith as a legitimate claim for social respect.
There are echoes here of Jean Baudrillard’s idea of simulation: Fake popularity stands in for a popularity based on positive-sentiment, which originally stood in for deserved renown based on achievements. Whatever the case, we can't go back to pre-modern times: Boorstin is a bore. There's no longer an active debate about whether a famous person should have "achieved something."
But there's also no way to understand the confusion of present times without considering the full scale of empty popularity. How much of our culture is presented as "popular" without being popular? This systemic breakdown has already boosted countless shameless people, and their presentation as "popular" breeds intense cynicism about the very possibility of whether our society can have shared values. How can you have a society when anti-social actions are the most rewarded?
Empty popularity has certainly already shaped 21st century culture. Faux-popular stars of the 2000s set the moral horizon for millions of aspiring social media creators in the 2010s. The most successful YouTubers and streamers moved up the rankings through outrageous sociopathic behavior. And now this cohort has broke into the very center of culture. As novelist Will Leitch recently said about the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson boxing match: “It’s one thing to watch a farcical fight; it’s another entirely when farcical fights are all that are left.”