Digital Fame

Google Books reportedly now contains over five million books. That’s 500 billion words covering over 500 years: a seriously impressive figure. But even more impressive is what you can do with 500 billion words – as long as they’re digitised.

The big change doesn’t come from the sheer mass of words and numbers but from the fact the text is stored in a computer, enabling quick and easy searches for words or phrases you’re interested in. If you’ve ever tried to find a particular quote in, say, ‘The Complete Works of Shakespeare’, then you’ll understand why this is a big deal. 

But digital books aren’t just a useful toy for English Literature students. Researchers have studied these five million books and counted the number of times words appear in them from 1800 to the year 2000, tracking how our use of word usage has changed in that period. So far, so academic.

However they also found it was also possible to measure a person’s fame by tracking the mention of their name, and that famous people today are younger than ever before. In the Twentieth Century, people became famous on average at just 29, whereas fame didn’t come knocking for their nineteenth-century equivalents until they were 43. And it seems Andy Warhol was spot on when he predicted we’d all be famous for just 15 minutes; today’s celebrities have less time in the spotlight than ever before.

What this research shows is the burgeoning power and potential of digital data. We have relatively little digital data about our historical chums, but with more people than ever posting on blogs, forums and social media sites, the amount of digitised information about modern folks available is increasing at an unprecedented rate. All digital information can be searched at the click of a button, which means that all your likes, dislikes, habits and lifestyle can be found and analysed more quickly and easily than ever before.

This data could transform the way recruitment works, potentially allowing recruiters to match jobs to candidates without relying on CVs or formal references. Obviously, trawling through the many chaotically different sources on the internet is a little different to trawling through five million carefully composed and written books. But a time may come when the ‘digital you’ is understood and judged by the sum of your Facebook comments, forum posts and blog entries.

 

Stuart Carter is employed as an SEO Web Editor for recruitment company Elan. He writes both on and about the web, which he loves.