Printed Media

In the long-standing tradition of stratification research, one major source of power and sta-tus has been virtually ignored, until recently: fame. People aspire to fame, just as they aspire to political power, wealth, income, education, and health. Moreover, fame affects social disparities in these other resources in significant ways. Yet, whereas sociologists have extensively investigated inequalities along these other dimensions, the differential allocation of public visibility and attention to members of a society is only now beginning to attract significant scholarly interest. Sociologists in the emergent field of fame and celebrity (Ferris 2007) converge on the view that public attention to people is highl