Famous means being the recipient of more attention than you can return in any medium.

For people with a professional outlook, it's hard to understand how something that isn't professionally produced could affect them.

Two things have to happen for someone to be famous:

Collective action is the hardest kind of group effort, requiring a group of people to commit themselves to undertaking a particular effort together, and to do so in a way that makes the decision of the group binding on the individual members.

When a profession has been created as a result of some scarcity, as with librarians or TV programmers, the professionals are often the last ones to see it when that scarcity goes away. It's easier to understand that you face competition than obsolescence.

Imbalance drives large social systems rather than damaging them. Only 2% of users ever contribute, yet that is enough to create profound value for millions of users.

The number of people who are willing to start something is MUCH smaller than the number of people willing to contribute once someone else starts something.

The downside of fame : being unable to reciprocate in the way our friends and colleagues would like us to.

Fame is simply an inbalance between inbound and outbound attention, more arrows pointing in than out.