Yeah, I'm not trying to define Culture overall, but instead identify to my own satisfaction some... social behavior/expectation patterns within a culture. I do think the larger the culture, the more time the culture has to achieve these things, so Chinese celebrities might be the legends and heroes of years gone by-- but it's also something I'm especially interested in when it comes to America, which I think is especially hetereogenus when it comes to extremely different cultures living side by side.

Industry culture is definitely part of what I'm talking about, by the way, as well as corporate culture. Steve Ballmer is a Microsoft internal celebrity. My HR woman is a producer. I'm a passive observer of it. Generally as an observer I'm going to know the names of some of my local producers, and the celebs. As a producer, theoretically, I'd know the name of all the celebs, and many other producers. As a celeb, I'd know the names of the celebs, forget the names of producers except my local producers, and try not to notice the observers. And almost certainly be an observer and/or producer in more than one other culture myself.

Amusingly, one reason I started thinking about this is that in Animal Crossing, the characters that are in every town are somewhat known as the 'celebrities'. Why? Because everybody (in the Animal Crossing virtual and meta communities) knows their names.