An idea worth at least 40 nano Kardashians of your attention

In my class today, celebrated science journalist Alister Doyle shared an insight that crystalized for me a line of thinking I’ve been exploring about media attention, celebrity and charity. Doyle shared an idea he’s developing with Paul Salopek (and let me just pause and mention how intimidating it is to have characters like Doyle and Salopek as “students” in a class I’m teaching), in which journalists develop new units of measure to explain complex and elusive concepts. The unit he shared, which he credits to Salopek, is the Jolie. A Jolie is unit that denotes the amount of international aid a country receives when it becomes the cause celebre of a prominent celebrity. He offers a working definition as the difference between aid per person to Darfur, which benefits from Jolie’s focus and advocacy, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has not. In 2005, International Rescue Committee calculated that Darfur received $300 per capita in aid, while DRC received $11 per capita. Hence, a Jolie can be thought of as a 27x increase in aid receipt. When international aid organizations campaign for increased aid, they’re seeking ceniJolies in increased aid, and would often settle for increases of mere miliJolies.

Jolie is able to attract aid to Darfur through her passion, her hard work, but ultimately through the fact that she’s the subject of a great deal of attention. While her recent films may not have attracted as much attention as her work as Lara Croft, she commands approximately 35 centiKardashians of attention.
The Kardashian is a unit I proposed a few classes back as a measure of attention. Conceptually, the Kardashian is the amount of global attention Kim Kardashian commands across all media over the space of a day. In an ideal, frictionless universe, we’d determine a Kardashian by measuring the percentage of all broadcast media, conversations and thoughts dedicated to Kim Kardashian. In practical terms, we can approximate a Kardashian by using a tool like Google Insights for Search – compare a given search term to Kim Kardashian and you can discover how small a fraction of a Kardashian any given issue or cause merits.
(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.)