Kim Kardashian as a Unit of Measurement
Capital of Nasty, an Electronic Magazine - ISSN 1482-0471
Wednesday, May 23, 2012 at 20:00 (6819/9)
Categories:
Opinion
Ethan Zuckerman is proposing a new unit to measure attention called the Kardashian. 1 Kardashian equals to the "amount of global attention Kim Kardashian commands across all media over the space of a day."
I choose the Kardashian as a unit both because I like the mitteleuropean feel of the term -- like the Ohm or the Roentgen -- and because Kardashian is an exemplar of attention disconnected from merit, talent or reason. The Kardashian mentions how much attention is paid, not how much attention is deserved, so naming the unit after someone who is famous for being famous seems appropriate. Should the unit be adopted, I would hope that future scholars will calculate Kardashians using whatever public figure is appropriate at the time for being inappropriately famous.
Please enter your comment below. Hit Return twice (leaving a completely blank line) between paragraphs.
Use [b] for bold [/b] and [i] for italic [/i]. All other HTML commands will be stripped.
Your comment is (almost) immediately placed online as soon as you hit 'Post'.
Specifying an email address is optional. In the interests of your own privacy, CoN discourages you from doing so. Further, think twice about revealing any other personal information including telephone number, real name, exact address or blood type.