So addicted to that buzz in the air

In a recent interview designed to gin up interest in her new webzine, the Daily Beast, Tina Brown -- former editor of such buzz-infused publications as Vanity Fair and the New Yorker -- offered a keen precis on the Gospel of Buzz. Her interlocutor asked Brown how she dealt with the nasty jabs and vicious smears and mean-spirited quips that have come flying her way over the years, as her employment fortunes rose and fell and rose. “It’s great when people trash you,” Brown told “CBS Sunday Morning” with a bright smile, “because it means that you’re interesting and they still want to write about you.”

Implicit in Brown’s reply is her conviction that when nobody is talking about you -- when you’re being ignored and forgotten -- you suffer a far, far worse fate than being ridiculed and reviled. To be deemed unbuzzworthy, to be dismissed as too insignificant even to warrant the effort of a clever put-down, is to know a chilly exile of Siberian proportion.

Brown, as it happens, is correct: In the modern world, as long as you’re being discussed, you’re alive. Which means the corollary is also true: If you’re not being discussed, you’re dead.

This rule applies to objects, events and ideas as well as people, of course. And thus buzz -- that flitting, mysterious thing, that veritable Tinkerbell that can be chased and charmed but never quite pinned down -- is more than mere publicity. It is more than simple gossip. To a certain subset of the population that is dependent upon quantitative evaluations such as ticket sales and rating points and website hits, it is something else entirely: It is oxygen -- a crucial, life-sustaining, generative force.

What’s hot, what’s not, what’s up, what’s down: We all know the language of hype, of buzz, of cool. These days, marketing wiles often are celebrated as much as the objects actually being marketed. Those super-expensive Super Bowl ads get the same ink as the game.

It’s fashionable to note that buzz is inevitable to the human condition, that Eve gossiped about Adam -- and it was just a short leap from the Garden of Eden to Google. As humans, we are constitutionally predisposed to want to know the latest, the hippest, the juiciest, the most popular. A propensity to love buzz is intertwined with our DNA. Buzz has been around forever.

Except that it hasn’t.

As Leo Braudy points out in his classic 1986 book, “The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History,” concepts such as buzz and hype and fame and publicity are relatively new. It’s been only in the last several hundred years that people could find out what a great many other people were buying, were talking about, were thinking about, were reading, were seeing.

Gutenberg took the plunge into desktop publishing, and the Industrial Revolution came along and spiced things up with devices such as the telegraph and the telephone. Mass marketing began, courtesy of department stores. And buzz -- the adhesive that clings to some stuff but not to other stuff -- was born.

Buzz gets a bad rap at times. Those who try and fail to obtain it for their wares or themselves are apt to complain that buzz is shallow and superficial, that it rewards pizazz and glamour over substance.

Perhaps so. But there’s also something cool about buzz. About its very unpredictability. About its ever-strange and always-surprising way of thwarting the logic and dollars mustered to try to nudge it in a particular direction.

“I know that half my advertising budget is wasted,” a tycoon once complained. “I just don’t know which half.”

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jikeller@tribune.com