It can be instructive to compare the characteristics of earlier eras in the publishing industry to those of our own.
For example, Charles Darwin's only assets capable of engendering public acceptance were his internal stature within a rather restricted profession, and the innate cogency of his thesis; yet The Origin of Species quickly sold off the shelves. In an earlier time, Thomas Paine's political tracts gained wide enough popular acceptance to play a significant role in moving Britain's North American colonies to revolution, even though Paine did not have formal credentials of any kind.
If such major ideas could be sold without the stamp of celebrity, then clearly, one significant distinction between earlier times and our own is a greater willingness on the part of an earlier reading public to evaluate a proposition for themselves.
What gave earlier readers this greater confidence?
Part of the difference probably lies in a sense of the scope and manageability of knowledge itself. Whereas in earlier eras it seemed plausible that an educated layman could have at least a passing familiarity with the major intellectual developments of his time, today the scope of evolving knowledge is coming to be perceived as simply beyond anyone's ability to fathom.
But probably a more significant difference is that in Paine's era, if an idea made sense in terms of a reader's own direct personal experience, that validated it in the reader's mind. People in Paine's time were reasonably confident that the world they knew and experienced was the "real world."
By contrast, in our own media-saturated age, we have internalized an assumption that significant commentary and insight into the workings of the world must virtually by definition deal with the "larger" world presented to us by the media. It is then only natural for us to believe that the best way for observations about this realm to carry weight and credibility is to come from people who are intimately familiar with the "higher realm"—i.e., from the media world's celebrity "inhabitants."
