Late US artist Andy Warhol is believed to have once said, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”

But in this age of social media, selfies (自拍), and the Internet, it’s hard to say what “fame” actually is.

In the movie Vox Lux (《光之声》), which was first shown this month at the Venice Film Festival, US director Brady Corbet tries to answer that question.

“Fame is a commodification of everything, where violence becomes something you sell, news becomes something you sell, even private life does,” the movie’s star Natalie Portman told reporters at the Toronto International Film Festival.

In the movie, the Israeli-US actress plays the lead role of Celeste, a pop singer who’s 14 years into a hugely successful career. By that point, however, the character has become bitter (忿忿不平的) and her fame is beginning to fade – compared to her younger self, a sweet and carefree girl who suddenly finds herself in the spotlight.

This is a classic (经典的) tale of a rise to fame, but in today’s world of social media, it’s easy for just about anyone with a smartphone to become famous. But as more and more people search for the spotlight, this may add pressure on many of us to keep up with the “perfect” lives we see on the Internet.

“It appears that most people ... are living lives full of nothing but happiness, love, and rewarding events and experiences,” psychologist (心理学家) Kurt Smith wrote on HuffPost.

That isn’t to say that everyone uses their popularity to make others feel bad about themselves. Take UK beauty blogger Em Ford for example. In 2015, the online star, known for her makeup tutorials (教程), posted a video in which she slowly removed her flawless makeup, showing her bad skin underneath (在下面). “I wanted to create a film that showed how social media can set unrealistic expectations for both women and men,” Ford wrote in the video’s description.

So, it seems that the definition of fame changes all the time. But if Vox Lux teaches us one lesson, it’s that if we’re lucky enough to obtain the “commodity” of fame, we should spend it wisely.

A city in South Korea, which has the world’s largest number of people using smartphones, has placed flashing lights and laser (激光) beams at a road crossing to warn “smartphone zombies” to look up and drivers to slow down, in the hope of preventing accidents.

The designers of the system were motivated by growing worry that more pedestrians (行人) buried in their phones will become victims in a country that already has some of the highest road death and injury rates among developed countries. State-run Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology (KICT) believes its system of flashing lights at zebra crossings can warn both pedestrians and drivers.

In addition to red, yellow and blue LED lights on the pavement, “smombies”—smartphone zombies—will be warned by laser beams projected from power poles and a warning sent to the phones by an app that they are about to step into traffic.

“An increasing number of smombie accidents have happened in pedestrian crossings, so these zombie lights are extremely important or absolutely necessary to prevent these pedestrian accidents,” said KICT senior researcher Kim Jong-hoon. Drivers are warned by the flashing lights, which have shown to be effective 83.4 percent of the time in the institute’s tests involving about 1,000 vehicles.

In 2017, more than 1,600 pedestrians were killed in auto-related accidents, which is about 40 percent of total traffic deaths, according to data from the Traffic Accident Analysis System. For now, the smombie warning system is placed only in Ilsan, a suburban city about 30 km northwest of the capital, Seoul, but is expected to go nationwide, according to the institute.

Kim Dan-hee, a 23-year-old resident of Ilsan, welcomed the system, saying she was often too absorbed in her phone to remember to look at traffic. “This flashing light makes me feel safe as it makes me look around again, and I hope that we can have more of these in town,” she said.

Nowadays technologies benefit us a lot in our daily life, but if not properly used, they can affect our health．The bed is supposed to be reserved as a place for sleep, but people tend to read an iPad a lot in bed before they go to sleep．

Charles Czeisler, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues got a small group of people for an experiment．For five days in a row, the people read either a paper book or an iPad for four hours before sleep．Their sleep patterns were monitored all night．Before and after each trial period, the people took hourly blood tests to paint a day-long picture of just how much melatonin（褪黑激素） was in their blood at any given time．

When subjects read on the iPad as compared to the paper books, they reported feeling less sleepy at night and less active the following morning．People also took longer to fall asleep on the iPad nights, and the blood tests showed that their melatonin secretion（分泌） was delayed by an hour and a half．

The researchers conclude in today's journal article that given the rise of e-readers and the increasingly widespread use of e-things among children and adolescents, more research into the long-term consequences of these devices on health and safety is urgently needed．Czeisler and colleagues go on, in the research paper, to note "Reading an iPad in bed may increase cancer risk"．

However, software has been developed that can reduce some of the blue light from the screens of phones and computers according to time of day, and there are also glasses that are made to filter（过滤） short wavelengths．While they seem like a logical solution for the nighttime tech users, it needs more research．