Reflections on Life and Faith,
by David Keating

 Fifteen Minutes of Fame - or Something Like It

August 5, 2006

     I have pretty eclectic tastes when it comes to television. Just about anything is good enough when I only want to vegetate.  If I'm really desperate, I can even put up with that Australian crocodile hunter fella.

     But some things I just cannot manage. You may know the stuff I mean. The programs where the headlines scream "My husband's mother's son's brother is the father of my child." Or where people let sensationalist therapists psychoanalyze them in front of a live audience and broadcast their emotional angst across the country. Or who go to a fake courtroom to complain that the neighbour owes them a hundred bucks because their dog watered their prize petunias.

     Watching such programs seems to me kind of like watching kids pull the wings off of flies.

     On the other hand, the reasons why people agree to appear on such shows, over and above the possibility of making a few bucks, are not so complicated. We all have a desire for our fifteen minutes of fame. That cliché grew out of a quote by Andy Warhol, who said that in the future everyone would be world-famous for fifteen minutes.

    In addition to seemingly endless reality TV offerings, the Internet has made this possible in a way that Warhol could never have imagined. For the first time in history, it's possible for any of us to put our thoughts in front of a global audience. Blogs, which are essentially online journals, number in the tens of millions. And social networking websites like MySpace and YouTube give users the opportunity to create and share video and audio snippets that highlight everything from the culturally sublime to the sublimely silly. You may have seen the clip of the fellow whose video just shows him dancing around in his underwear for five minutes. Every news program from CBC to CNN seems to have run it. Move over Saturday Night Fever.

     Why do so many people feel compelled to make themselves so visible? Unlike the group of Middle East teenagers who have continued to carry on a dialogue even while their respective leaderships do their best to destroy them, most blogs are pretty ordinary.

     As some researchers claim, it could simply be an attempt to make good on Warhol's fifteen minutes. We want to be famous. And since the technology makes it so easy to do, why not? Who, knows, you might end up dancing on the national news.

     I wonder, though, if it isn't something more.

     As human beings, we want to feel that we're known and valued as individuals. But in the hurly burly of living, we have come to the point where we often feel as though we're invisible even to our friends.

     Jesus said that God knows us so well that even the number of hairs on our head are known, which hopefully doesn't mean that God knows me a little less every year.

    When we thought of God as the guy in white robes sitting on a throne in the clouds, that was comforting. We could visualize God as a parent keeping an eye on us in the same way that we keep an eye on our kids.

     But as our understanding of God has changed, we've become less certain of that image. We wonder if God is really paying attention. If not, we look for that attention somewhere else.

     For me, understanding God as intimately connected to all of Creation, which includes me, is more powerful than any cloud-wrapped throne.

David Keating