Designer notoriety: What the Lubitz case tells us about the accumulation of attention capital in celebrity culture

Andreas Lubitz and the Germanwings Airbus crash

On 24 March 2015, a Germanwings Airbus A320 Flight 4U9525, from Barcelona to Dusseldorf, crashed in the French Alps. All 150 people on board died. In the eyes of the authorities, suspicions about the circumstances of the calamity were swiftly aroused. No mechanical faults in the airborne flight of the plane were observed by witnesses on the ground. Weather conditions were favourable and stable. The aero-nautical industry regards this to be the safest environment of air travel. So what went wrong?

Immediately, speculation fell either on a mechanical fault in the plane’s equipment or an act of terrorism. However, when the plane’s black box was located something wholly unexpected emerged. According to the French investigators, the flight recorder showed conclusively that the co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, deliberately crashed the aircraft. The possibility of terrorist or extreme religious motivations on his part were considered, but quickly discarded. Resorting to the ‘background factor’ of a decisive medical condition in perpetuating a fatal personality disorder is what any reader of Katz’s (2015) account of intimate massacres would expect. Sure enough, in short order, the mass media reported that Lubitz had a history of depression. Furthermore, on the eve of the crash, he was diagnosed with a recurrence of symptoms. To begin with, this was latched onto as the most likely reason for the alleged episode of suicide-homicide: Lubitz was portrayed as an isolated individual suffering from mental illness. But none of this was conclusively demonstrated. Rather, it was insinuated. In the Lubitz case, the mass media reported that documents obtained by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), under the Freedom of Information Act, showed that, earlier in his career, he was debarred from flying because of his condition. In July 2009, the FAA declined his request to revalidate his pilot’s licence because, 6 months earlier, he was prescribed anti-depressants and received psychotherapy to combat his symptoms. The medical certification division of the FAA enforces strict rules that prohibit operation of an aircraft when medical treatment is required. After due scrutiny, the FAA was satisfied that Lubitz’s depression was under control. His licence was renewed. However, the mass media suggested that thenceforward, he was uncomfortably aware that, if the symptoms of depression returned, his lifelong passion for flying risked being negated, at any moment (Kulish and Clark, 2015).

Initially then, mass media reports submitted a double pretext for the alleged, voluntary, planned atrocity. First, Lubitz was portrayed as a depressive whose symptoms predisposed him to commit a fatal, misanthropic act. Second, the trigger to the intimate massacre was taken to be his fear that he was about to undergo the degradation that his licence to fly was about to be imminently revoked. In the United Kingdom, ‘Madman in cockpit’ was the headline in the Sun (27.03.2015) newspaper; ‘Killer Pilot Suffered From Depression’ was the lead in the Daily Mirror (27.03.2015); ‘Why on Earth was he allowed to fly?’ asked the Daily Mail (27.03.2015). Needless to say, this type of reporting was heedless of detailed academic and medical research on the aetiology of depression. The media portrayed the causal path in this question as a type of depression that required propitiation through an act of suicide-mass-homicide as self-evident. It would not be out of place to describe this assurance in media reporting as cavalier. Depression is a common illness in the West. In spite of this, the complexity of the condition is not generally well understood. The symptoms, which include feelings of guilt, despair, rage, worthlessness, anxiety and a decrease in pleasurable activity, afflict around 14 percent of adults (Dobson and Dozois, 2008). Contra media suppositions, the medical evidence shows that the direct link between depression and mass murder is tenuous. It is fair to say that popular media accounts of Lubitz’s alleged motivation, that dwelt upon the metastization of his condition into misanthropy were nothing but shadow boxing with the facts. Notwithstanding that, initially media presentations that hypothesized depression as the key to the high-profile tragedy overwhelmingly dominated and shaped public understanding.

However, the proposition was soon supplemented by speculation that a separate motive also played a major part in the catastrophe. Here, we come to the crux of the matter for students of celebrity. The popular media account of Lubitz as a depressive, misanthrope, indeed a personality who was defined by his purported antagonism to humanity, was modified by suggesting that his alleged conduct was related to a social malaise: celebrity culture. At once, Lubitz ceased to be cast as a disturbed, lone disordered personality acting against society. A more complex picture began to emerge in which his alleged homicidal tendency was related to toxic properties in contemporary culture.

The root of this revisionist account is a media interview with his ex-girlfriend, denoted as ‘Maria W’. According to her testimony, at one point in the course of their relationship, Lubitz declared blankly: ‘one day I’m going to do something that will change the whole system, and everyone will know my name and remember’, (BBC News: 28.03.2015). Now, it might be inferred that in everyday life, statements of this sort are commonly apprehended as nothing more than ingredients en passant, of daily banter. There is nothing to suggest that ‘Maria W’ took it seriously enough at the time to alert the authorities. In Lubitz’s case, the statement only acquires a grave accent because of the new operating insinuation in media reports: namely, that a background factor in why he sabotaged the flight was a desire to gain personal fame. Importantly, the alleged voluntary crash was now redefined as a double pathology. Lubitz was sick, but so is the society around him, which makes celebrity a general fixation in modern life. What emerges most cogently from this twist in media narratives is that celebrity culture is expounded and seemingly accepted, as a factor behind the alleged act of sabotage, without demur. How can this be?

Apart from Lubitz’s alleged, brief and unsupported statement to his girlfriend that he coveted renown, there is scant proof that celebrity culture is relevant to the crash. The line of causality relies wholly upon insinuation and inference. Celebrity culture is credible as a factor in his alleged act of sabotage because it is strongly associated with wider, extreme forms of negative behaviour in society. For example, among other things, critics deplore it for fomenting the spread of pseudo-events, the fetish of well knowness for the sake of well knowness, superficiality, syndromes of over-dependency, attention-seeking and the infantilization of culture (Boorstin, 1961; Chouliaraki, 2012; Ferris and Harris, 2011; Pinksy and Young, 2009; Weber, 2009). In this long list of misdemeanours, the motive of mass homicide as a gateway to celebrity does not seem at all anomalous. Indeed, the public is well schooled to accept this logic.

In the Lubitz case then, after the testimony of Maria W, the seat of the alleged crime was no longer designated to rest in the individual pathology of depression. In addition, the pursuit of attention capital, which celebrity culture is held to stimulate to a morbid degree, was portrayed as satiated by means of a deliberate, notorious, aggressive act calculated to generate attention capital. Here, notoriety means rather more than the commission of an illegitimate act that is recognized locally. What might have been a vain boast by Lubitz is allowed to stand in the media as a decisive marker of character and explanandum of conduct. His alleged ambition to become ‘well known’ by ‘changing the system’, combined with his medical condition, and the negligence of the authorities to diagnose it correctly, were interpreted as a triple lock that resulted in the alleged voluntary sabotage of the flight. In short, one factor motivating Lubitz’s conduct was the desire to acquire global celebrity, albeit it posthumously.

As the investigations made by French prosecutors advanced, the shift to alleged dereliction in the role of the authorities grew more pronounced. This strengthened the implication that Lubitz was both a murderer, and at some level also a victim, of noxious cultural forces. It was put to the preliminary inquiry that Lubitz had seen 41 doctors in the 5 years before the fatal crash. In Germany, doctors risk criminal prosecution if they release medical information about patients. The only exception is if they are satisfied that the public might be at risk by not doing so. In Lubitz’s case, this diagnosis was never made. Thus, media assessments pointed to serious malfunctions in the professional management of Lubitz’s medical history as a further circumstantial factor in the crash. As an aside, it might be noted that if the search for fame was indeed at the heart of the disaster, Lubitz achieved resounding posthumous success. The suggestion that the crash was intentional transformed Lubitz from a person with no media profile into a global celebrity, albeit for short duration.

So much for what a recent example of designer notoriety can reveal. But what does it mean culturally, to seek notoriety through an historical act? To answer this requires a few words on what historians mean by an ‘World Historical Event’.

The World Historical Event

Among historians, a World Historical Event (WHE) is defined as a derailment of temporal order. They have in mind incidents that are commonly recognized to change the course of human history - that is, events of fundamental importance to collective life. Michael Oakeshott’s (1999) distinction between ‘the practical past’ and ‘the historical past’ is of relevance here. By ‘the practical past’ is meant the subjective memories, items of data, narratives of experience, reflections and so on, that we carry around with us as capable persons. In contrast, ‘the historical past’ is the record of events that is held to possess objective cultural significance, that is, a category of collective meaning that transcends subjective considerations. Here, a further distinction should be drawn between Natural Historical Events and Man-Made Historical Events. A Natural Historical Event is a product of natural forces, for example, a tsunami, an earthquake, an eruption and so on. A Man-Made WHE refers to a derailment of temporal order caused by intentional human agency, for example, the American War of Independence (1776), the French Revolution (1789), World War One (1914–1918), the Bolshevik Revolution (1917), World War Two (1939–45) and so on. Strictly speaking, the category of Natural Historical Events are not independent of human agency. For example, many commentators contend that the morbidity and lesser disruption caused by Hurricane Katrina (2005) was exacerbated by insufficient federal, state and city investment in US flood defences and disaster relief provision (Brinkley, 2006; Trotter and Fernandez, 2009). In this sense, it is reasonable to propose that Natural Historical Events entail a man-made dimension. The observation is not limited to the Katrina disaster, which, it should be recalled, cost over 1500 lives, left 10,000 homeless and destroyed 140,000 homes (Aldrich and Crook, 2008: 379).

As human society has developed, knowledge about the probability of derailments of temporal order through acts of Nature, and measures to combat their effects, has grown and become generally more reliable. The decision not to utilize this knowledge at a practical level reflects the work of power networks and cultural, political and economic struggles and compromises. In this respect, the failure to provide for adequate flood defences in New Orleans and Louisiana in 2005 is widely regarded to have been caused by the diversion of public funds to the politically high-profile ‘war against terror’. Notwithstanding this caveat, the distinction between Natural and Man-Made WHEs has sufficient purchase to be retained as a helpful academic tool. For while the scale and impact of Natural Events are a combination of natural and cultural forces, Man-Made WHEs are chiefly understood as products of human agency, that is, they do not arise, nor do they develop, independently of human strategies and actions (Matthewman, 2015).

Immediately, a problem arises. That is, the WHE cannot be understood merely in terms of the act itself (White, 2008: 10). What is decisive is the social reaction to the event. Among historians and indeed among the general public, there is heated debate about the mechanics of selectivity and the attribution of WHEs. The attribution of an historical act that purportedly derails and transforms normative order, involves interpretation and judgement. This raises the questions of (a) why some acts are selected as historically noteworthy while others are not and (b) who makes the judgement. For example, did 9/11 really change the course of human history? Or was that a judgement of the mass media (White, 2008: 14)? In addition, the question of cultural relativism arises. Thus, the meaning of the act looks very different when viewed through the eyes of an Al Qaeda insurgent, compared with an ordinary American citizen.

In grappling with these issues, historians have developed three criteria to classify WHEs:

Right away, there is a telling parallel to be drawn between historical events and celebrity culture. For celebrity also involves selectivity and transcendence. In the words of David Marshall (1997: ix-x), the crux of celebrity is ‘greater presence’ in the public sphere. If an historical event has scale in social consciousness, it follows that planning and activating derailment of normative order may be plausibly interpreted as a catalyst for personal renown.

However, there are two sides to this issue that need to be differentiated. Undoubtedly, designer notoriety may be a choice made by some individuals and groups to acquire and accumulate attention capital (Van Kriekan, 2012). This hypothesis may be investigated by considering the cases of any number of agents who elect to dramatically de-stabilize normative order. In the case of intimate massacres, these voluntary attempts might be referred to as ‘Micro World Historical Events’. That is, they do not possess sufficient force to change the course of history. However, their publicity value is such that they can saturate news coverage in intense temporal bursts. It is not a question of the media’s position in affirming the moral legitimacy of the template of designer notoriety here; it is simply the technical judgement that there is an equation between the voluntary derailment of normative order and the acquisition of fame.

There is another, related issue. The audience dynamics of mass media dispose news and opinions to be presented as parts of an inexorable stream of episodes, incidents and emergencies. What follows from this is the acknowledgement that dramatic and sensational items are likely to grab more attention in news feeds than accounts of historical contexts or structural unfolding. In a word, Western media have developed, to an unusually refined level, event consciousness, over deeper, reflective, and reflexive, ways of reading the world (Rojek, 2013). To generate attention capital from the mass media then is not confined to full-scale WHEs. Increasingly, the requirements of conventional news-feeds posit Micro World Historical Events as ways of generating attention capital. In this vein, Semati (2002: 214) speaks of a ‘blockbuster imagination’ at work in the construction of news narratives. That is, events that entail conflict, drama, violence and cognate threats to public safety, have trophy status in newsrooms. They grab headlines.

Event inflation, the demotic turn and mediatization

In the spirit of Sameti’s innovative linguistics, it might be ventured that blockbuster imagination results in what is called event inflation. Three aspects of event inflation should be distinguished. In the first place, media reporting focuses on events, episodes and emergencies (rather than processes and structures). Second, the portrayal of events as disjointed or isolated incidents tends to exaggerate the historical significance of Micro World Historical Events in the reporting platform. Even if the significance of notorious events is eventually moderated after due deliberation, the initial reaction of the media is to portray them as jaw-dropping dislocations of normative order. Third, event inflation involves the prolongation of notorious event items in news narratives. If all of this is accepted, it is not the inherent quality of the newsworthy act, but the mediagenic potential of the act that is decisive. Crucially, it is necessary to observe that this potential precedes the act and that it does so as an adjunct of the normal processes of media reporting.

Graeme Turner (2004, 2010) has coined the useful concept of ‘the demotic turn’ to refer to the enlargement of media interest in ordinary life. In cultures organized around ascribed or achieved celebrity, the architecture of admiration is explicitly hierarchical. Those who occupy positions of honour and prestige, through birth or appointment (Kings, Queens, Emperors, Moguls, Prime Ministers, Presidents etc.) extract admiration by reason of the social and spatial magnitude that separates them from the lesser members of Court Society, the peasantry and the electorate (and the material and symbolic powers that go with it). The rise of achieved celebrity, where admiration is mostly based upon the acknowledgement of extraordinary talent or accomplishment took over and adapted this machinery. It is one reason why celestial metaphors – ‘stars’, the ‘firmament’ and ‘galaxy’ – emerged so readily in the evolution of cultures of achieved celebrity (Alberoni, 1972).

In contrast, under the demotic turn, the ordinary is lionized (Turner, 2010). This is not so much a celebration of ordinary people, but of the civic culture that created them, and guarantees their worth. By extension, the right of ordinary people to proclaim their unique, special status, including their grievances and real or imagined degradation at the hands of others, is encouraged. Civic culture insists that every citizen has the right to make the most of their talents and to freely attack cultural, economic and social barriers (Wolin, 2008). The education system pursues this with vigour, but it is also evident in the news narratives of the media and the genre of Reality TV. This shades over into the presumption that every citizen is talented. For in mass aspirational culture, it is politically disagreeable for individuals, or entire groups of people, to be dismissed as talentless or worthless. Since the days of the Ancient Greek agora a frequent complaint made against democracy is that the plebiscitary form that it has necessarily adopted for Parliamentary systems excludes the voices of ordinary people. The demotic turn, which, these days, owes so much to social media, is neutralizing this by massively multiplying and expanding public outlets for self expression. Faced with stiff competition, and the challenges of Web 2.0 networking, the institutionalized media is proliferating multiple fronts for the emergence of celetoids, that is, ordinary people invested with attention capital by media producers.

Perpetrators of intimate massacres are one of the leading examples of celetoid culture. Typically, they dominate news coverage in short, intense periods and then are forgotten. On most occasions nowadays, when I ask my students who Andreas Lubitz was, nobody knows. When I move on to refer to a plane crash in which all passengers were apparently deliberately killed, there is a much higher level of recognition. In as much as this is the case, if the desire for fame really was a motive in Lubitz’s conduct, he has lost the wager. People seem to remember the event, not the celetoid. The triviality and ephemerality of much of the content of celetoid culture should not be confused with the triviality of its consequences. Media platforms for the expression of acceptance and approval of the ordinary are expanding.

In sum, civic culture in democratic society is a culture of everyman (and woman). In managed democracy it is not plausible to claim that ordinary people possess real effective power. The fulcrum of this power is the corporate-state axis (Wolin, 2008). Yet the bedrock upon which this rests is the insistence that everyone is free and able to express their interests and challenge injustice. Formally speaking, democratic society works on the principle that all are privileged to have a voice. The mass elevation of the demotic as interesting and deserving of respect is the hallmark of mass, aspirational civic culture. By extension, the real or imagined grievances that prevent people from being or feeling respected are newsworthy. Consecutively, this raises the twin spectres of the credibility and credulity of these cultures. For it is prosaic truth that not everyone is talented in any sense worthy of the term. In a society where values of acceptance and approval are fetishized, everyone matters. In such circumstances, the bid to acquire fame by ensuring that people will ‘know my name’ is comprehensible.

To recap and, by way of elaboration, part of ‘the demotic turn’ is the cultivation, among some, otherwise unexceptional people, of the belief that they automatically deserve public recognition (Turner, 2004, 2010). This extends to perceived humiliations or real and imagined degradations that they have suffered. Consecutively, society reproduces a system of organized inequality that ensures that the overwhelming majority never achieve their ambitions. Society produces the general experience of achievement famine. By the term achievement famine is meant the aggregate of psychological, emotional and social symptoms that derive from what is termed manqué status, that is, a person who falls short of his or her aspirations or talents (Rojek, 2001: 149–159). If all of this is correct, the mental anguish and self questioning that follow from being saddled with manqué status may be more widespread than is commonly thought. In celebrity culture manqué status takes a peculiar form because it occurs in social and historical circumstances in which the ordinary is elevated and massively valorized in celetoid-world. These conditions are propitious for turning personal troubles into public cause celebres. If individuals take the view that the public does not pay sufficient heed to their evident qualities, it is only natural to take matters into their own hands and seek to publicize them. Intimate massacres facilitate the quest for designer notoriety.

As we have noted, popular media reports initially portrayed Lubitz as a lone nut whose depression took the form of a misanthropic high profile act that resulted in the deaths of 149 innocent people. It might have been the plot line from an action drama movie starring Bruce Willis, Liam Neeson or Jason Statham. The parallel between movie blockbusters and the blockbuster imagination involved in notorious acts and new narratives is telling. Among Media and Communication theorists, over the past decade, mediatization has emerged as a trenchant concept in the analysis of media events and processes (Couldry, 2008; Hepp, 2013; Livingstone, 2009). Mediatization holds that the conventions, scripts and presumptions of the media are absorbed, implemented and expanded in everyday life encounters and networks. To be sure, in some circles, there is fierce resistance to the argument. Prima facie it resembles the Frankfurt School’s culture industry thesis. This thesis maintains that the mass media dominate social consciousness and control social behaviour. In the analysis of media effects, the social determinism of the theory is widely regarded as passé. However, it is a mistake to regard mediatization as a mere sequel to the culture industry thesis. Mediatization holds that news narratives and entertainment forms are styled (Couldry and Hepp, 2017). Styling involves complex chains of selection and presentation among producers and discrimination and assimilation among consumers. The crucial point is that styling influences voluntary behaviour. Typically, these processes operate finally to reinforce a particular kind of unstated moral order in which distinct kinds of attention capital are understood to possess high value. The institutionalized media render as ‘taken for granted’, ‘normal’ and ‘inevitable’ a type of normative moral order that is, in fact, a particular and historical form of social order. In the course of this, it is by no means unusual or accidental for the media to present news in sensationalist terms that ‘routinely’ cross the boundaries between fact and fiction (Dubied and Hanitzsch, 2014: 4). Events can hardly be excluded from the news media. In democracies, events, especially when they carry (or are invested with) the whiff of notoriety, grip social consciousness (Runciman, 2013: 293). The media operate as the dominant, and arguably, the ultimate, moral force in society today. Mediatization holds that not only do they frame the dimensions of public understanding about events, they also style the content and manner in which events are popularly communicated.

Mediatization stimulates event inflation. The latter is a complex concept. To begin with, it means a concentration upon visible fragments of public behaviour, rather than underlying structural causes and processes. The presentation of the world as a perpetual hail-storm of dislocated, random events, episodes, incidents, emergencies and Micro World Historical Events, hinders public opinion from making connections and establishing continuities. Instead the demand for immediate, direct, rapid responses on the part of public authorities and private interests is privileged. In this respect event consciousness may be said to retard social activism. For it heightens public alarm that ordinary life is perpetually at risk, and calls upon salaried professional personnel to engage in urgent risk management. In throwing everything at the incident or the episode, the agents of public security mistake symptoms for causes.

Another important aspect of event inflation is that in presenting the world as a ceaseless onslaught of events, incidents and emergencies, the ante is upped to dramatize and sensationalize news items. News editors distort and exaggerate the portrayal of events in order to maximize public attention. As Wolin (2008: 285) wryly notes, in the United States, blanket media coverage of Saddam Hussein’s purported weapons of mass destruction imprinted itself upon general social consciousness in ways that can only be described today as irrational. Hence, in 2006, 2 years after the purported threat was proved to be a media illusion, the number of Americans who believed that weapons of mass destruction were secreted in Iraq actually increased from 35 to 50 percent. A similar margin believe that there was a link between Saddam and Al-Qaeda, despite the absence of any reputable, confirming evidence. Nor should the role of social media in perpetuating myths and distortions be discounted. To return to the Lubitz case, media reports of sabotage proliferated chat sites and blogging sites dedicated to accounting for motives in their own terms. Some claimed that Lubitz had a Muslim girlfriend and had pledged to commit Jihad for Allah. The trigger to the crash was not Lubitz’s deteriorating mental condition but his determination to avenge the German authorities’ closure of mosques in the northern city of Bremen in December 2014 (sthomasaquinasversusnasa.blogspot.co.uk). Postings on Facebook praised him as a ‘holy martyr’ who died for ‘our Prophet’ (pamellegeller.com). Others argued that his actions were induced by the psychiatric drugs prescribed for his condition (fiddaman.blogspot.co.uk). There was even a blog suggesting that Lubitz was innocent and implicitly framed by the deep state for some (as yet) unspecified reason (ktwop.com). Rumour-mills of this sort may lack compelling evidence, but in post-truth/fake news society, they now routinely accompany media narratives of notorious acts (Gamson, 2011). Web sites like Flickr, Gawker, Myspace and Perez Hilton may be described as Web 2.0 switchboards of ego engorgement. These sites are explicitly and self-consciously positioned outside the system. They have no truck with cultural intermediaries, marketing campaigns, studio contracts, feature spreads or prime-time broadcasts. On the other hand, the generation of attention capital is their sole raison d’etre. The capital in question may be directed to build non-commodified forms of community. Nonetheless, despite being positioned outside the system, the means of communication bear the birthmarks of the standards of presentation and exchange that predominate in the institutionalized media (Couldry and Hepp, 2017).

Conclusion

Designer notoriety is the deliberate planning and implementation of an act calculated to galvanize media interest and accumulate attention capital for the greater public profile of the perpetrator. It would not occur unless the media presented certain categories of disruptive behaviour as mediagenic. The Lubitz case is by no means isolated. Juergensmeyer (2003) has coined the term ‘performance violence’ to capture the mediagenesis of calculated ‘media friendly’ civic derailment. Designer notoriety is highly compatible with media saturated society. Thus, according to media reports, at his trial for the murder of John Lennon, Mark David Chapman cited the desire to acquire global fame through a momentous act of notoriety as a motivating factor behind the killing (Elliott, 1999). In 2004, he testified to a parole board that he wanted to ‘steal’ Lennon’s fame. In this respect, he judged his act of notoriety to be a resounding success. ‘I am a bigger nobody than I was before’, he told the parole board (BBC News 15.10.2004). In recent times, the media reported the notorious acts committed by Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, Seung-Hui Cho, Anders Behring Brevik and Adam Lanza as connected to sentiments that I wish to designate designer notoriety. Lanza was portrayed as having a history of being fascinated with the media reaction to the massacre committed by Anders Behring Brevik in 2011. According to Brevik’s testimony, his terror rampage that resulted in the deaths of 77 people, was designed to publicize his manifesto against Islam, ‘Cultural Marxism’ and feminism. Brevik presented himself as a self-appointed hero for white Christian society. As such, the mass killing was designed to make his presence known so that his demented ideas would be more widely known. Before him, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the perpetrators of the Columbine massacre, are reported to have consciously sought immortality through an intimate massacre. Harris is reported to have ‘scripted Columbine as a made-for-tv murder’ and speculated, with Klebold, over who could be trusted to direct the movie of the crime: Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino (Cullen, 2009: 277: Gibbs and Roche, 1999)? Half-way through his killing spree in April 2007, Seung-Hui Cho, the mass murderer who killed 32 people and wounded 17 others in the Virginia Tech massacre, posted a DVD of his self styled manifesto to the New York headquarters of NBC News. The media reported that in the DVD he portrayed himself as an avenger acting for what he called ‘defenceless people’ to right the unspecified wrongs supposedly done to them by society. Cho saw himself not as a killer, but as a heroic avenger. By targeting the offspring of achievement culture, he believed he was doing a service to mankind by exposing hypocrisy and injustice.

The common denominator in mass media coverage of the aforementioned cases is a focus on the use of extreme violence by ordinary people to attain celebrity. The fame in question may be no more than what normally accrues to the celetoid. Designers of notoriety are portrayed either as craving popular recognition for certain unrecognized qualities or grievances, or acting as an unappointed avenger for anonymous others. The aim is to acquire attention capital via the mass media. Indeed, gaining attention capital from the media is the essence of the event. The meaning of the notorious act does not lie in the act in itself, but in media recognition. It is in this perturbing sense that acts of designer notoriety may be described as mediagenic. In privileging mostly uncorroborated reports about the celebrity fixation of these assailants, the media unintentionally multiply the appeal of designer notoriety. For, after the logic of censure and disapproval has been worked through, the media participate in making unexceptional people, who plan and despatch notorious acts in order to acquire attention capital, nothing less than global celetoids. For the purposes of this article, what is of primary analytic interest is the question of public receptivity to the connection between notorious acts and the personal search for fame, and further, the widespread readiness to accept such acts without demur. Through a combination of technology (mass communications/digital networks) and the development of civic culture (empowerment/social inclusion), the principle of social and spatial magnitude that used to be the crux of fame and admiration is being eroded. Graeme Turner (2004, 2010) speaks of ‘the demotic turn’ and Joshua Gamson (2011) directs attention to a profound transformation in the contours of celebrity culture which are ‘increasingly populated’ by ‘unexceptional people’. The exceptional act, the intimate massacre, the Micro World Historical Event, are the means by which unexceptional people gain the attention of the mass media and acquire celetoid status.