Rojek, Chris. "The Fame Formula." Fame Attack: The Inflation of Celebrity and Its Consequences. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012. 27–34. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 28 Sep. 2021.
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Copyright © Chris Rojek 2012. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 2 The Fame Formula
reasonable inference of the emphasis put here upon the connection between celebrity and the PR-Media hub is that today, fame is formulaic. If modern celebrity advances by design rather than accretion, it must be right to see fame as partly a product of the labour of cultural intermediaries, especially in the areas of opinion Aresearch, personality layering and impression management. On this logic, celebrities are not born. They are made. The purpose of assembling and polishing a celebrity is to achieve high impact factor ratings with the public. The term ‘impact factor’ refers to the space given to an individual or a brand on the horizon of public life. It is measured quantitatively in press column inches, print citations and airwave time. The objective behind engineering a high impact factor is to consolidate and advance the interests of business, government or special interest groups. This circle is hardly virtuous, for it is apparent that, unlike Bernays, the PR-Media hub has ceased to confi ne itself to moulding public opinion so as to ensure that the objectives of leaders coincide with the subconscious good and true motivations of the group. Manipulation, in the sense of charming-up superfi cial needs and creating new markets, is now blatantly part of the game. Yet all things being equal, it is entirely plausible for the PR-Media hub to claim the capacity to conjure fame and ensure its endurance, by mixing the required impression management and publicity potions. This is indeed what representatives of the complex say that they accomplish for clients. Publicist Mark Borkowski even offers a formula that claims to put the relationship on a scientifi c footing: F(T) = B + P (1 + 10T + 1/2T2). Thus: