Tiger and the Salahis: Two Kinds of Celebrity Crash

There are two kinds of celebrity crash. The first, like Tiger Woods' on Nov. 27, is accidental. You leave your house and drive your car into a tree, 911 is called, the authorities become involved, and the incident cannot be contained by the walls of your estate or the iron grip of your publicist. You give cryptic answers and implore the media (and cops) to respect your privacy. Anyone with further questions can see your official statement.

The second is intentional. You crash a President's state dinner or crash a balloon into a Colorado field. Like Michaele and Tareq Salahi, the socialites and Real Housewives of D.C. aspirants who swanned into the White House on Nov. 24, you do doughnuts on the lawn of notoriety and smack head-on into the tree of shamelessness. Then you take pictures of the steaming wreck and post them on Facebook while touting your availability for "national and international" product endorsements. Anyone with further questions can see your agent. (See the top 10 people caught on Facebook.)

There are two kinds of celebrity crash because we now have two kinds of celebrity: attention controllers and attention seekers. Woods is an example of the former, whom you might also know as "people who are famous for actually doing things." Attention controllers' fame derives from some public competence; their private lives are used as complementary assets (setting the photo ops, selling the baby pics), but with tight boundaries.

This old-fashioned kind of fame is still a posh deal, but it has lost its imperial prerogatives. Time was, you might have expected the fraternity of sportswriters or political reporters to peddle one version of you in public and save another one for their buddies at the bar. Now TMZ hits "post" instantaneously on allegations of infidelity, angry wives and golf clubs, and Google makes no distinction between respectable news and what people really want to know. When Woods said in a statement on Dec. 2, "I have let my family down," while still insisting that "personal sins should not require press releases," it was as quaint and futile as President Barack Obama's calling Kanye West a jackass in front of reporters and then asking for take-backs. (See the screwups of Campaign '08.)

Attention seekers like the Salahis are the sort of people referred to as "famous for being famous" — an accurate description and not the same as "famous for nothing." Being famous is a skill, which requires knowing how celebrity works today.

For attention seekers, controversy is the point, not the distraction. Private acts are public life. Whereas the attention controller draws power by withholding, the attention seeker draws it by exposing. (While Woods retreated, the Salahis were busy stringing Matt Lauer along, promising to show proof of their innocence — someday.) Living is personal branding. Facebook, Twitter, reality TV — you are always on and always out there. Naturally you would spend a Tuesday evening effecting a national-security breach with a camera and a makeup artist in tow. Doesn't everyone? (See the top 10 celebrity Twitter feeds.)

The balance of fame seems to be moving from attention controllers to attention seekers. So it makes sense that we're seeing crossovers. Sarah Palin was governor of Alaska until — bummed out by ethics investigations and the press — she could no longer manage as an attention controller (albeit one who used her family life to political advantage when possible). So she resigned and became a full-time attention seeker, a media entity whose posts, tweets and TV appearances are not extensions of her work but the work itself. (Rate the candidates for TIME's Person of the Year 2009.)

Both attention controllers and attention seekers can have fatal blind spots. The attention controllers, like Woods, come to believe that their accomplishments in the real world, along with their personal wealth, can insulate them from the artificial world of media frenzies. By the time they realize they're wrong, they find that, like the golf champ, they're not in a protective bunker but in a sand trap, and digging themselves deeper. (See pictures of Elin and Tiger Woods on Golf.com.)

Attention seekers like the Salahis, and before them the Heenes, suffer the opposite delusion: believing that their success in the world of pseudocelebrity insulates them from real-world consequences. In a state of media-induced temporary insanity, you might forget that people could get annoyed at you for faking your kid's balloon accident or that the feds would not laugh off a breach of the President's security as a hoot for a reality show. You close your eyes and hear the crowd cheering for an encore when they're actually gathering torches and pitchforks.

But what the Salahis seem to understand that Woods did not is that in our world, attention is like gravity: a force that you cannot command to cease. Fight it, and it will plow you under. Ride it, like a downhill skier or a skydiver, and — well, you may still crash. But you'll make a very photogenic wreck.

Watch TIME's video "Nerd vs. Tiger: Guess Who Wins?"

Read "Looking for Reasons to Care About Tiger Woods."

See People.com: "Tiger Woods Apologizes for His 'Sins.' "